WHEN ON 17 July 1897 the steamship Portland docked at Seattle, bringing belated news and hard evidence that an enormously rich strike of gold had been made the summer before along the Klondike River on the extreme western border of Canada, the world was startled by a felicitous sentence scribbled in haste by an excited reporter who visited the ship. Instead of saying that the miners had reached Seattle with ‘a huge amount of gold’ or ‘a treasure-trove of gold,’ he wrote words that became immortal: ‘At 3 o’clock this morning the Steamer Portland from St. Michael for Seattle, passed up the Sound with more than a ton of solid gold aboard.’
Those sensational words, ‘a ton of gold,’ flashed around the world, evoking wild enthusiasm wherever they appeared. Across the United States and Canada, men who had suffered sore deprivation during the great financial panic of 1893 cried: ‘Gold to be had for the picking! Fortunes for everyone!’ and off they scrambled, with no knowledge at all of mining or metallurgy, and very little sense of how to protect themselves on a frontier. Shifty manipulators, who realized that they would have little chance of finding gold in riverbeds, nevertheless knew that with the proper card game or attractive young woman to lure those who did find nuggets, they might win fortunes by mining the miners. Proper businessmen also smelled opportunities; actors out of work visualized theaters with dancing girls, and a few born explorers of untested regions, like Lord Evelyn Luton and his military cousin Harry Carpenter of London, made immediate preparations to rush to the gold fields for the sheer adventure.
But if the news of the strike could have such electric effect upon so many, why had it taken almost a full year to travel the relatively short distance from the Klondike to Seattle, less than thirteen hundred miles as an eagle would fly? The explanation must be carefully noted, for it explains the tragic events that were about to destroy so many lives.
The Klondike was a pitiful little stream, too small to admit a boat of any serious size and hidden away in one of the most remote areas of the world. It emptied into the great Yukon River, which rose in the high mountains of the northern coastal range and roamed through Canada and Alaska for more than nineteen hundred desolate and uninhabited miles. So if the big river was available, why had not the miners who found the gold taken boats down the Yukon to bring the news to civilization? Unfortunately, the mighty river was frozen almost solid from early in October through to the first weeks in June. The men who had discovered the bonanza and would profit from it had made their strike so late in the summer of 1896 that they could not get down the Yukon until early summer of the next year. For nearly eleven months they had lived with their great wealth and their explosive secret, but now the genie was out of the bottle and chaos was about to ensue.
There were two other awesome facts about the discovery on the Klondike: although the gold fields, and they were unbelievably rich and extensive, lay entirely in Canada, there was no practical way to get from the principal settlements of western Canada to the region; the only feasible route was through Alaska, but anyone who tried that found himself facing one of the most fearsome physical challenges in the world, the dreaded Chilkoot Pass, at places almost straight up and passing through snowfields and mountain defiles. And if he did negotiate Chilkoot or the neighboring and equally formidable White Pass, which many failed to do, he then had to build himself a small boat from felled timber, to negotiate a series of deadly rapids and gorges and make a long, dangerous sail down the Yukon to approach the gold fields from the south. ‘In from the south, out to the north’ was the rule at Dawson City, the Canadian settlement that sprang up near the spot where the little Klondike emptied into the wide Yukon.
It was this land—of frozen rivers, tempestuous gorges, impossible ascents through snow and ice, long sweeps of river through a thousand miles of wilderness—that in the late summer of 1897 attracted adventurers from all parts of the world, and not one of them, when he left Australia, or Indiana, or Ottawa or London, anticipated the hardships he would have to undergo before he reached Golconda.
In London, a few days after the news from Seattle appeared in national newspapers, a rich uncle and his impecunious nephew, members of the English noble family of Bradcombe, read of the ‘ton of gold’ with considerable excitement. The older man, Lord Evelyn Luton, was the younger son of the redoubtable Marquess of Deal, eighth of that line whose Bradcombe ancestors had helped Queen Elizabeth establish a Protestant foothold in Catholic Ireland. Luton was thirty-one, imperially tall and slim, aloof, soft-spoken, unmarried and a man with a sometimes insufferable patrician manner. He despised familiarity, especially from underlings, and whenever a stranger presumed to approach him uninvited he tended to draw back, lift his nose as if he smelled an unpleasant odor undetected by others, and stare at the intruder. A friend at Oxford had termed this ‘Evelyn’s silent-sneer,’ and when a listener had pointed out that all sneers are silent, the first student had replied: ‘Look to your dictionary. Anyway, when Evelyn hits you with his silent one, it speaks volumes.’
Another friend had argued: ‘His critics may be right when they call him insufferable, but we suffer him because he’s so … well … correct,’ and the first man had agreed: ‘He is always right, you know.’ But even this concession did not satisfy the first man: ‘Thing I like about him, when he embarks on any project, he’s loyal to all who accompany him.’
As a result of interminable practice when a boy he had, with only meager athletic skills to begin with, converted himself into one of England’s finest cricketers. When not playing for his county team or representing England against Australia, he was an avid explorer, having penetrated to the upper reaches of the Congo, much of the Amazon, and, of course, the Nile to a point well beyond the great temples at Karnak.
Actually, there was a solid reason for his wanting to leap into the middle of what threatened to become a gold rush, since so many wished to join, but he scarcely admitted this to himself and certainly not to strangers. Having already probed both Africa and South America on daring expeditions, he fancied traveling next to the arctic and later to remote corners of Asia with the purpose ultimately of writing a travel book, perhaps to be called An Englishman in the Far Corners, in which he would exhibit, as he explained to himself, ‘how an ordinary fellow with a bit of determination could follow in the footsteps of the great explorers.’ He patterned himself after notable prototypes who had carried the British flag into the most dangerous parts of the world: Sir Richard Burton, who had written about primitive India and Africa, and Charles Doughty with his incredible Travels in Arabia Deserta.
Of all the intrepid explorations that had fired the imagination of an entire generation of Englishmen it was the expeditions to the high arctic in search of the fabled Northwest Passage that had most excited Luton. While up at Oxford he had read as many accounts as he could procure of the brave men who had led these northern explorations: Sir John Ross; Sir William Edward Parry, who had attempted to reach the North Pole; Sir Robert McClure, the first to discover the passage through the arctic waters. But none of these men’s deeds had affected Luton as much as that of the noblest and most tragic explorer of them all: Sir John Franklin, who had perished with his gallant team in 1847 in his bold effort to discover the elusive passage.
Knowing intimately the travails of such Englishmen, Luton felt himself adequately prepared to face whatever challenges a mere gold rush might present. He would be venturing near the lands these men had discovered, perhaps even treading in the path of Sir John Franklin himself, who had once sailed the Mackenzie River in an early commission to map the coastline of the Arctic Ocean.
Luton had no doubt that he could succeed on his far lesser mission. On several occasions he had demonstrated that he was fearless by performing acts of some valor, but when asked about this he rejected that word: ‘Fearless? Who told you that? Did they also tell you I was so terrified I wet me britches?’ To him the fragmentary word that reached London about the extensive dangers accompanying the gold rush presented an inviting challenge, but he would never have admitted that, for he had cloaked his former adventures as a seeking after scholarship, a thirst for knowledge, and this time he was already explaining to himself and others: ‘What I’d like, you know, is to give me nephew a spot of help.’ He pronounced the word nev-ue.
This nephew, Philip Henslow, aged nineteen, was the son of Luton’s older sister, and since this made him a grandson of the Marquess of Deal, who was extremely wealthy, it might be supposed that young Philip did not want for money. But that was not the case. His mother, who as the daughter of a marquess enjoyed the title of Lady Phyllis, had displayed both temper and deplorable judgment in ignoring her father’s strictures and eloping with a young chap named Henslow, whom the marquess refused to accept, for he was brash, liberal and Catholic. Growled the old noblemen: ‘Henslow’s the shifty type Queen Elizabeth would have hanged, because he was plotting to remove her from the throne in favor of Mary the Scot.’
Both Lady Phyllis and her son Philip had been in effect disinherited by the intractable marquess, and since the amiable Henslow had precious little money, the family was more or less strapped. Of course, when the marquess finally died, if he ever did, Lord Luton would be in a position to siphon off some of the Deal fortune to his sister and her son Philip, but while the old man lived, funds were needed.
For these contrasting reasons, love of adventure on Luton’s part and need on his nephew’s, the former dispatched his footman to Oxford to detach Philip from studies he was conducting during vacation and fetch him to His Lordship’s club in Mayfair. ‘Really, Philip,’ Luton explained to his nephew as they dined that July night in his club, ‘it’s a matter of patriotism.’
‘Why should one route to the gold fields be more patriotic than another?’
‘Have you no sense of geography? Can’t you visualize Canada?’
‘I care little about Canada,’ the younger man confessed, ‘and very little about South Africa or India either.’ He was not teasing, this handsome nineteen-year-old from Eton, about to go up to Oxford, with his modest flair for the classics.
‘Canada lies north of the United States, as I’m quite sure you know,’ Luton said, ‘and that’s the infuriating part.’
With bread rolls and tumblers, His Lordship laid out North America, with a teacup representing Alaska well off to the left: ‘This cascade of American gold we keep hearing about, it’s all from Canada, you know. Not a farthing in the American part.’ And he used a small silver teaspoon to represent the Yukon as it wound its way across the Alaskan border into northwestern Canada. ‘Here’s where the gold is, totally on our side.’
‘What’s deplorable about that?’ Philip asked, using one of the big words to which he was addicted.
‘To reach the gold, which is all Canadian, you must thread your way through this deplorable Alaska …’ He caught Philip smiling, and the young man said: ‘You’ve picked up one of my words again.’
‘Did I? Which one this time?’
‘Deplorable.’
‘But damn me, it is deplorable to think that we’re forced to pass through American territory to reach what’s ours to begin with.’
For Luton, like most men of his upbringing, considered all those areas on his globe which were shaded red to be British. He cared little for political matters and was oblivious of the self-government accorded Canada in 1867 when he had barely taken his first steps across the nursery. India, South Africa, Canada: they were all part of the unparalleled British Empire, unlike the American states which had unwisely and rudely rebelled against England’s civilizing rule.
Philip did not need his uncle’s attitude explained, and so he simply asked: ‘Is there no other way?’
‘That’s what we’re here to find out, and we start our investigations tomorrow. We’ve got to put some funds in your exchequer.’
Of course, Luton could easily have stayed home and sent his nephew to look after his own money matters, but that was not his style.
He too had attended Eton, with no great distinction other than on the cricket field, and had later jollied his way through Oxford with a minimal degree. In both schools he had done a bit of boxing ‘to keep meself fit,’ as he phrased it, and a modest amount of chasing after young women prominent in the theater. He was known to his friends as an advocate of the telling gesture, as when he appeared dressed in full military regalia, but of the era of William of Orange, to hear the public speech of a general who had won minor honors in the Afghan war. A handshake from Luton was better than a contract attested by a notary, and his friends supposed that he would soon offer such a handshake to one of the various young women of good family whom he escorted to balls and to Ascot. Before he took this extremely grave step, for the Bradcombes did not divorce, he was now eager to lead a small group of like-minded Englishmen to adventure in the gold fields.
‘I’ll approach Harry tomorrow,’ he now told his nephew. ‘If we go, and I think we shall, I’d want him along.’
‘I, too,’ Philip said with unfeigned enthusiasm, for Harry Carpenter was one of those Englishmen who seemed to do everything easily. Thirty-seven and a graduate of a lesser school than Eton but a good one, he had received his degree from Cambridge with commendable honors but without much intense study. He had played rugby both for the university and his country and had served with his regiment on India’s northwest frontier. He knew nothing of mining, nothing of Canada, but everything about living arduously on whatever frontier he found himself. He had climbed in the Himalayas while on leave from his regiment, but had stayed well away from the highest peaks: ‘I don’t like cold weather and I’m afraid of high places.’ It was unlikely that he was afraid of much except his wife—one of the minor Bradcombes and a most determined woman—for he had more than proved his valor by tramping alone on a feckless scouting penetration from Peshawar on the Indian border, through the Khyber Pass and south into the markets of Kandahar to collect intelligence for a later strike against Afghanistan. He was a formidable man, secretive, self-disciplined and always eager to tackle the next assignment. He was aware that in civilian life he had performed only indifferently and that his place was with troops, but as he approached his forties with a slim or no chance of ever becoming a colonel—he simply hadn’t the private funds to support himself in a position as head of a regiment—he had decided that he was too old to be knocking about as a mere minor officer in some frontier unit in the foothills of the Himalayas, so his cousin Luton knew that for Harry, a chance to try his luck on the gold fields would prove a godsend.
Next day, when Luton tentatively suggested a foray into the Klondike, Harry, with his customary diffidence, affected to know nothing about the gold there: ‘Is that the place they’ve been making a fuss over in the papers? Revolution or something?’
‘Gold, Harry.’
‘Oh, yes. That Yukon bit.’
‘I was thinking of taking a look. Care to join me?’
‘Love to, old chap. Anything to get away from London for a while. But I say, Eskimos and all that. Will we be eating blubber?’
‘We’ll be a thousand miles from the Eskimos, if I calculate correctly.’ Luton closed the conversation with an invitation: ‘I say, Harry, I’m joining Phyllis’s boy at the club tonight for dinner. Care to join us, to talk seriously about this?’
‘I’ve found it dangerous to talk seriously about anything, but if you do go to the Klondike, consider me part of your team.’
That night Lord Luton and Philip seated themselves in the foyer of the club so as to keep an eye on the entrance, and it was Philip who spotted Carpenter first: ‘There he comes!’ and into the vestibule, where patrons deposited their cloaks to the care of an elderly attendant, stepped a man of medium height, sturdily built and with a rather large military mustache that projected about half an inch past the flare of each nostril. It was neither a garish mustache nor a flamboyant one; it was the rugged symbol of a rugged man, and opponents on many playing fields had grown to respect it.
‘I say, it’s good to see you, Philip. How’s the pater and all that?’ Carpenter was one of Luton’s rare friends who always asked about Henslow the Catholic interloper, and when he did, it was with honest affection, for he had always liked Philip’s father.
‘He told me to say hello,’ Philip replied. ‘Said he wished he could join us.’
‘In this Klondike business? He’d better stay home and mind the shop.’
‘No, he meant for dinner tonight.’
After a congenial meal, at which they discussed only county cricket, they wandered into the smoking room, where Harry said: ‘I’ve brought something you both must read, that is, if we’re going to pursue this gold foolishness,’ and he passed along a worthy book published in London in 1868. It was by the English explorer Frederick Whymper, Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska, and it recounted in delightful style his fifteen-month trip to that region in 1866.
But after Luton had given the book only a cursory glance he shoved it back: ‘Harry, the man was never in Canadian territory. Our plan must be to move only through Canada.’
Before he could elaborate on the patriotic impulses that such a statement inspired, a white-haired club attendant came to suggest that since four members playing whist had protested the racket being made by Carpenter’s rumbling voice, would the gentlemen please move to another room. Both Luton and Carpenter bowed politely to the servant, then to the whist players, and retired.
‘Now, what we would do, assuming that I joined you,’ Harry said as if there had been no rejection of his book, ‘is hie ourselves to San Francisco by one of the railroads they say they have, then catch a ship to Petropavlovsk in Siberia and take some Russian steamer across the Bering Sea to the mouth of the Yukon, and up we go to this place called Dawson City, wherever it is. It’s certainly not on this map.’
Lord Luton managed an icy laugh: ‘Harry, Whymper made his trip more than thirty years ago. If we wanted to go that route, we could take a train right out to this place called Seattle and then find us a big, comfortable oceangoing steamer straight to Alaska.’
‘Oh.’
‘But the whole purpose of our trip would be to make it exclusively on Empire terrain. Land in Montreal, go by train across Canada to a place whose name escapes me, go up one of the Canadian rivers, perhaps the Mackenzie, cross the Rockies, and drift easily down to the gold fields. Simple.’
‘Can it be done?’
‘Join me in the morning. We’ll visit the Canadian offices. They must have the information.’
And as the summer evening passed, with fine cigars and ancient cognac, Philip listened intently while Luton and Carpenter reviewed the reasons why entering the Klondike by an all-Empire route was not only an act of patriotism but also a most appropriate act for a son of the Marquess of Deal: ‘Have you ever read, Harry, how my grandfather, the seventh marquess, was so badly treated by the Americans in that Oregon nonsense years ago? The braggarts changed the jingle “Fifty-four-forty or Fight,” and my grandfather, who was in charge of negotiations for the English, said in this very club: “Very well, if the scoundrels want a fight, let’s give it them,” and he was prepared to lead volunteers into Canada, from which base he was ready to invade New York and Washington.’
‘What did the Americans do to humiliate him?’
‘That’s the proper word, humiliate. In the middle of the proceedings, with war inevitable, they called the whole thing off, surrendered their silly claim to what would have been half of Canada, and made my grandfather look rather foolish. Of course he was rather foolish, as you know, but he didn’t like to be exposed.’
‘What happened?’ Philip asked, and Luton said: ‘Nothing. It’s sometimes advantageous when nothing happens.’ But then he tightened his lips and added: ‘It did leave our family with an abiding distaste for what our relatives called their “ungrateful American colony.” Even today the Bradcombes try to avoid Americans.’
However, he could not help laughing at himself as he revealed one of the trivial reasons why he was personally impatient with Americans: ‘Anytime I meet one of them I have to explain my name. To them Evelyn can be only a girl’s name, three syllables, rather 1840, you know. I have to tell them that in civilized lands it’s an honored man’s name, two syllables, first one to rhyme with peeve or leave. I have sometimes thought that I would punch the next American who asks me about it.’
In the morning Harry Carpenter stopped by to pick up young Philip Henslow after paying his respects to the boy’s father. They proceeded to the club where Lord Luton was staying and then drove to the London offices of the Canadian government, where a commercial attaché awaited them. Taking them to his cluttered office, he sat them before a large wall map containing names with which he was familiar and they were not.
‘Of course, we’ve known for years about scattered gold in these regions up here, but this Klondike thing is rather special, isn’t it?’ When Luton nodded, the attaché said disparagingly: ‘Since these lurid American newspaper stories, we’ve been so deluged with inquiries that Ottawa has had to cable us two pages of reliable information, which I’ll pass along later. But for gentlemen of your standing, I must say our government would be most honored to receive you … well, I should think you ought to see a special cable which arrived only yesterday.’
‘We would profit from any information,’ Luton said, whereupon the attaché almost fell over himself to be gracious: ‘Could I have Miss Waterson fetch you some tea? Good.’
With a pointer he reviewed what he called the ‘rather simple problem of getting from London to Edmonton.’
‘And why Edmonton?’ Carpenter asked, and Luton interrupted: ‘That’s the name I was trying to remember!’
‘Your commodious Canadian steamer will disembark you at Montreal, a port equal in every way to New York, where the fast trains of the Canadian Pacific will carry you to Ottawa, Fort William and Winnipeg. Miss Waterson is from Winnipeg, and she can assure you it’s a splendid stopover for a short rest before heading into the gold country.’
Miss Waterson did so assure them.
‘And now we come to the exciting part of our trip, the journey through the vast lands of the Northwest Territories. Winnipeg across our District of Saskatchewan …’
‘What glorious names!’ Philip Henslow cried, and the attaché nodded: ‘They are indeed. Indian, too. And then west to Calgary, from which a spur runs north to Edmonton, the end of the railway and the beginning of your great adventure.’
‘Where’s Dawson City?’ Luton asked, and the Canadian said: ‘Well, sir, it’s not on the maps yet. It sprang up last year, overnight as it were.’
‘But where is it?’
The attaché explained: ‘I have a recent letter from Ottawa which sketches the new developments, and it places Dawson right about here,’ and he entered a dot on the map, siting it about a hundred and fifty miles nearer Edmonton than reality would justify.
‘So you see, gentlemen, when you leave the train in Edmonton you’re practically in the gold fields.’
‘What gear should we take?’ Carpenter asked, for when frontiers were involved he had a practical mind.
‘Oh, sir! Only your traveling kit. One bag, two bags. Because everything you could possibly need in the gold fields can be purchased in Edmonton, and at prices considerably less than those being charged in the United States, where, if the truth be known, they’re apt to prey upon the traveler.’ Luton said, as if making his goodbyes: ‘I can believe that,’ but the young man had one more important caution: ‘Milord, you really must get one fact burned into your mind, because a great deal depends upon your understanding of it. Here in England it’s July, glorious time of the summer, boating and croquet. But in northern Canada it’s almost the beginning of winter. If you’re going, go soon and go fast, because our northern winters can be terribly deep and tediously long.’
Luton nodded, but Carpenter felt that anyone with a respect for geography and good sense would know what the young man had just said; he was impatient to get down to business: ‘What was the cabled information you spoke of?’ and the attaché produced two extremely reassuring typed documents. The first had been issued by undesignated officials within the Edmonton Board of Trade, and it promised the traveler from Europe that the only sensible way for him or her to reach the gold fields was through Edmonton:
It is more direct, less tiring and cheaper. You have seen pictures of the dreaded Chilkoot Pass, which only the bravest and strongest can negotiate. Avoid it if you can. The ocean route to St. Michael is tedious and expensive, and when you get there you still have to move upstream along practically the entire length of the Yukon River.
Come to Edmonton. Use the all-Canadian route. And find yourself at the gateway to the gold you seek. From Edmonton you will have the choice of four easy routes which will be outlined to you by local experts, who will also provide you with guidebooks and maps. Come to Edmonton and make yourself a millionaire.
Both Luton and Carpenter dismissed this as an understandable effort by the merchants of a provincial city to lure business their way, but they were quite impressed by the cable which had arrived the day previous, for it summarized the reasoned views of two experienced travelers who had made the journey from Edmonton to Dawson and who assured prospective adventurers that the trip was not only practical but in certain respects pleasant. The first expert was a man named Ludwig Halverson, who told how one could come to Edmonton, head over an easy trail to the Peace River, cross a low divide, pick up the Liard River, move quickly to the Pelly, and drift comfortably down to a confluence with the Yukon, from which the gold fields would be only a few more miles, all downstream:
This route will prove both the easiest and quickest to the target. Any well-trained man with a good packhorse and a light canoe should be able to cover the pleasant distances in less than seven weeks, and the vigorous experience of sleeping in the open and breathing the world’s freshest air will prepare him for the easy work of panning for gold.
Halverson provided the prospector with various useful hints. One must not buy inferior equipment but wait till one reached Edmonton, where men long trained in frontier living would know what was best for travel in the north. Scurvy, which used to be a problem, was easily prevented by a proper diet, which local grocers would be happy to provide. When one found a rich placer deposit, one should have the gold assayed as promptly as possible and reduced to bricks for easier carriage. In fact, Halverson used the word easy so often that it became a kind of refrain, but the substance of his article was that by leaving from Edmonton and choosing one of the easy river routes to Dawson, the prospector would reach the fields much sooner than those who went by the American routes. He would thus be in a position to stake the best claims.
Harry Carpenter, well versed in the difficulties of travel in harsh places, knew intuitively that the trip might require somewhat more than seven weeks, but since he did not trace out the distance on the map, he visualized a trip not of twelve hundred miles but of something like four hundred. He said frankly that he, for one, would be more interested in the other major route, the one that was downstream most of the way, the one that focused on one of the great scarce-explored rivers of the world, the Mackenzie. It was a perplexing waterway, because it bore many different names—Finlay, Peace, Slave—a result of the fact that at different dates it had been discovered piecemeal and always from the warm south, but always it was the same great river, two thousand, six hundred miles in length from its birth in high mountains near Alaska to its entry into the arctic seas. It was a river to inspire the imagination of men, and Carpenter wanted to test it.
An explorer who had traveled it in both directions, Etienne Desbordays, explained in the second half of his report how efficient and awe-inspiring and, yes, even delightful the trip down the Mackenzie could be:
Wild animals in great profusion feed along the riverbanks as your boat or canoe glides past. Tall mountains grace the distance, and every turn in the river provides some new excitement, for you are traveling through some of the wildest and most beautiful land in North America.
Swiftly, silently the vast river carries you to your destination, and after a thousand miles of this effortless travel you approach the Beaufort Sea, an arm of the Arctic Ocean, but you are not headed there. Choosing any one of a dozen convenient rivers which feed into the Mackenzie from the west, you head west along the pleasant waterways, cross a low divide, and find yourself in the headwaters of the Klondike River itself, down which you drift, pausing to prospect at likely sites as you go.
Desbordays concluded that there could not be a more pleasant or effective way to reach the gold fields than to follow the Mackenzie. ‘And one of the glories of this route is that it is entirely Canadian. You pay no United States duties on your necessities when you come this way. You are on Canadian terrain all the way.’ As with the other route, there were a few facts of which he must have been aware but which in the service of salesmanship he chose to disregard.
The Canadian office in London was so pleased with the specific data provided by this long cable that steps had already been taken to publish it as an instructive pamphlet with maps and quotations from earlier correspondence, for as the attaché reminded Lord Luton: ‘You must remember, we’ve known about gold in Canada for the past six years. It’s just that this latest strike has gotten a little out of hand.’
‘Who are these Halverson and Desbordays?’ Carpenter asked the attaché, who in turn asked Miss Waterson if she knew of them. When she replied: ‘I’m from Winnipeg. That’s more than six hundred miles from Edmonton,’ the Englishmen caught some sense of the vast distances involved. Young Philip, good at math as well as classics, studied the wall map for some moments, then said: ‘You know, Uncle Evelyn, Edmonton to Dawson is a long way, a very long way,’ but the impact of his discovery was blunted by the attaché, who said enthusiastically: ‘Evelyn. That’s a fine English name we rarely hear in Canada,’ and the conversation turned to other matters.
It was decided that Lord Luton’s team would be comprised of himself, his cousin Harry Carpenter, his nephew Philip Henslow and an adventurous friend of Philip’s, an Oxford man of twenty-two named Trevor Blythe whose frail build and sensitive manner belied his courage and tenacity. These four would form an admirable team; two older men of mature judgment and great force supported by two younger gentlemen who had done well in school and who promised to do just as well in life. All four were resourceful, educated, and representative of the best that their exalted class could produce. On the night that they met together at Luton’s club for the first time, Luton had said with reserved pleasure: ‘I say, if any four in this city stand a chance to fight their way to the gold fields, it would be us.’ He saw his team as the next group of highly disciplined Englishmen to follow in the steps of the great explorers, who had all had backgrounds like theirs: a distant boarding school at age seven, knocked pillar to post by older boys at Eton or Harrow, rollicking through their university days at Oxford or Cambridge, serving in the army or navy when required, and on to a gallant life. The four were terribly able but also terribly deceptive; when you saw them move out as a group they might be headed insouciantly either for an afternoon’s punting on the Thames or to a nine-month probe of the headwaters of the Amazon.
That night Lord Luton started the next installment of the journal he had kept on all his explorations against the day when he might want to write of his adventures:
I doubt I could have put together a more trustworthy foursome: two grizzled veterans like Harry and me, and two stalwart young fellows just beginning to show their mettle, Philip and his friend Blythe. We understand the responsibilities of being Englishmen and I trust we shall conduct ourselves according to the highest traditions of that calling.
But it was clear both to Luton and Carpenter that a fifth man was needed, someone to do the heavy manual work, and it was fortunate that one of the country places pertaining to the Marquess of Deal was located in Northern Ireland, where Lord Luton had spent many of his summers. During his visits to the area where his father had lived before he inherited the marquisate, and where the old man had developed his distrust of Catholics, Evelyn had come to know rather well a fellow two years younger than himself who displayed a spirit and an ability that anyone would have respected. Timothy Fogarty was the son of poor farmers whose land had been absorbed generations ago when Queen Elizabeth moved Scottish crofters and English lords across the Irish Sea ‘to civilize,’ as she said, ‘the people of that unfortunate island.’
An early Marquess of Deal had been one of her agents in this effort at altering the character of a land, and he had been a holy terror, rooting out priests and establishing in their stead reliable Protestant ministers. Subsequent members of the Brad combe family bad been more conciliatory, but all had one propensity: they lived in Ireland as long as they bore the subsidiary title Lord Luton, but once they inherited the marquisate, they moved promptly to one of their several senior estates in England and rarely saw Ireland again.
The present Lord Luton, who stood no chance of inheriting the marquisate, was not at all like that; he liked Ireland, its gentle ways and lyrical manner; in particular he liked what he had seen of Fogarty. From the brash young lad’s first days on the Luton properties he had displayed such an innate understanding of animals and fish that Evelyn had quickly designated him an apprentice to the elderly Irish gamekeeper who minded the wildlife on the estates. He proved exceptionally qualified to be a ghillie, the Scottish term that Luton used for his field helpers, and in addition, he was well-mannered and could sing like the paid choristers in a London church. He was big of chest, but not overly tall, and when he applied himself to a task he could do prodigious amounts of work. He had only a sparse education, which he fortified with common sense, and if a group of traveling Englishmen with money wanted a factotum, they could find no one better suited to this task than Tim Fogarty. Married to a responsible lass named Jenny, he was nevertheless always eager for a new challenge, and since he had the native intelligence to attack it in a new way, he was almost ideal for the job Lord Luton had in mind. However, he did have one weakness about which the noble lord did not know: Tim Fogarty, though in training to become a traditional Irish gamekeeper, was one of the canniest poachers in Ireland. No trout stream was safe from his attentions, and even those he was hired to protect fell prey to his nighttime explorations, for he was a master of the shaded light, the well-cast line. He did not consider his poaching criminal in any respect, for as he confided to his priest: ‘A man cannot love horses and roses and prize hogs unless he also loves fish … and I do love them.’
Lord Luton could not command his ghillie to accompany him to Canada—the days of peonage were over—but he could make the trip so enticing that the Irishman had to accept. When Fogarty crossed the Irish Sea and presented himself in London, he listened only a few moments to the proposal before he said enthusiastically: ‘I’ll go,’ and asked forthwith for permission to return to Belfast for his kit. Luton took out his wallet and said: ‘Not necessary. Take this, but buy only the necessities this afternoon. The rest we’ll get in Edmonton.’ Fogarty demurred: ‘It’s not only me kit. It’s me wife. Jenny would be …’
Lord Luton stiffened and a foreboding scowl darkened his face: ‘Buy it here, not in Ireland. Each moment of summer is precious,’ and Fogarty, accepting the proffered money, nodded.
Next day, when the Luton party entrained for Liverpool, Fogarty was aboard, because English gentlemen and Irishmen could act almost precipitately when they had to. Since both Luton and Carpenter wanted to reach the gold fields promptly, they booked passage on the first ship bound for Canada.
They embarked on 25 July 1897, and were agreeably surprised to find themselves on one of the most elegant ships to ply the North Atlantic: the Parisian, pride of Canada’s Allan Royal Mail Line. Long and sleek, she boasted four towering masts from which hung a forest of yardarms and a blizzard of white sails. But the power of this vessel was indicated by two big, blunt smokestacks amidships, for the Parisian was powered by both sail and steam, which made her a mistress of the seas, The gentlemen’s cabins were spacious and comfortable and the saloon well appointed with oak and ash floors, its walls and slender pillars decorated in leather. Chairs of walnut burnished to a soft glow offered a welcome seat after a bracing walk on the promenade deck.
The captain, at whose table they were seated that evening, commended them on their discernment in choosing his ship. The Parisian, he explained, had been cleverly designed with saloon amidships which dampened the pitch of the steamer in high seas and made dining on board as tranquil as on shore. The captain continued his proud description with details of the innovative bilge keels that kept her steady in the water and explanations of how he used both her steam and sail power to best advantage, but Luton, tiring of his boasts, distracted him with a question: ‘Why the name Parisian if she’s a Canadian ship?’ and the captain replied: ‘It’s a mark of the respect, sir, that we Canadians hold for France.’ Luton bristled at this reminder of what his family considered Canada’s blemished past under French rule, and quickly changed the subject: ‘How long d’you think before we see Montreal? The twelve days we were promised?’ and the captain said: ‘Aye, twelve days, if the weather doesn’t blow.’
During their calm crossing one of the basic rules of the trip evolved, and in a somewhat unpleasant way. Trevor Blythe, whose family kept a staff of seven, began summoning Fogarty, who slept on a lower deck, and giving him orders as if the Irishman were his assigned manservant. This had to be done conspicuously, because the four gentlemen in Luton’s party occupied first-class quarters, while Fogarty shared a cramped cabin with two other men in steerage. So when Blythe felt he needed Fogarty’s services he had to take obvious steps to summon him.
Fogarty did not complain; he knew he was a kind of servant, but Lord Luton was distressed by Blythe’s action, and after this infraction of the tacit rules of such an expedition occurred for the third time, Luton and Carpenter asked the two younger men to join them in a secluded corner of the ship’s luxurious saloon.
‘This isn’t pleasant and it isn’t crucial, so let’s not make an affair of it,’ Luton said after a deferential cough. ‘But I think we must understand certain rules. Nothing in writing, no saluting or the raising of voices.’ He coughed again and was obviously uneasy: ‘Harry and I’ve been through this often, and I’m sure you young fellows will catch on immediately.’
When Henslow and Blythe looked at each other in bewilderment, Luton snapped: ‘Dammit, you make it difficult to say, but Fogarty is the expedition’s servant, not at the beck and call of individuals.’
Now Blythe realized that he was the subject of the meeting, and before either Luton or Carpenter could speak further, he apologized profusely: ‘I say, I am most fearfully sorry. It was thoughtlessness, Evelyn, sheer thoughtlessness.’
Luton, relieved to see that the young man was taking the admonition properly, sighed, thrust out his hand and clasped Trevor’s: ‘Thanks. I knew you’d understand. Harry, lay out the rules.’
‘Quite simple. It’s as Evelyn said. Fogarty is at the service of the party as a whole, never of an individual. I think an example will clarify it nicely. When we’re in camp and require wood for the stove, it will be Fogarty’s job to see that we get the wood, but each of us in proper turn will help him do it. And should he suggest that Evelyn chop down that tree over there, I would expect Evelyn to hop to it smartly and chop the thing down.’
‘Highly sensible,’ said Blythe without a sign of rancor.
‘Now, if young Philip here needs his socks washed because he’s worn them too long on the trail, he need not call for Fogarty. He jolly well washes them himself.’
‘Understood?’ Luton asked, and when the young men nodded, he added: ‘Good. But Fogarty has agreed to cut our hair during our long trip, and for that, each of us must pay him in cash. Understood?’
Not once on their long journey together would anyone call the Irishman anything but Fogarty, which was understandable, since none knew his first name or showed any interest in learning it, but that night in his notes Lord Luton did praise the ghillie:
There are few people in this world more pleasant to deal with than a well-trained Irishman who knows his place, and our ghillie Fogarty is one of the best. I spotted him young and have had him work with our finest hands. In due course, fifteen, sixteen years, he’ll be my gamekeeper, and I doubt I’ll ever have a better.
Harry and I have had to lay down the rules to our two young men. How could they know the niceties if we didn’t tell them? And I am proud to say they snapped to and saluted like proper soldiers. That’s the way to launch an expedition properly, and tonight I appreciate more than ever the stalwart abilities of Carpenter. I’d not like to go ahead without him.
The latter part of the twelve-day crossing to Montreal established patterns which would prevail during the months ahead. Philip spent long hours in the ship’s library, which overlooked the saloon, reading and then almost memorizing parts of Whymper’s account of his journeys in Alaska, and whenever the Yukon River was mentioned he took special notice. In time he knew that waterway as intimately as one could from maps and a book, but his uncle almost ridiculed this effort: ‘The part of the Yukon you’re reading about is entirely in American territory, and we’re not going that way.’ Nevertheless, the young man continued his preoccupation with the river.
After some days of browsing the ship’s limited collection of books, Trevor Blythe concentrated his attention on one of the small volumes he had borrowed from his mother, Palgrave’s well-regarded Golden Treasury, the 1861 anthology of what was considered at that time the essence of English lyrical poetry. Trevor had, of course, made himself familiar with most of the poems, but since he aspired to adding perhaps a lyric or two of his own to the grand assembly, he wished to know the works intimately. On this excursion, through prolonged study of the more gracious poems, he hoped to learn the secrets of effective prosody.
During his two years at Oxford, Blythe had attracted favorable attention for his youthful poems and some university critics had gone so far as to say that he had the authentic English voice. He did not think so; his reverence for the songs of Sidney, Herrick and Waller was so profound that he doubted he could ever add to their flawless statements, but he did want to understand the sorcery whereby they had achieved their miracles. So as the ship sliced through the North Atlantic swells he would sometimes cry with the joy of late discovery: ‘Philip! Did you ever catch the felicity, there’s no other word for it, of Waller’s cry? I must’ve read it a dozen times but never before …’ And as the ship plowed westward he would read those lines which had for centuries tugged at the hearts of young men:
Go, lovely Rose!
Tell her, that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
Lord Luton and Harry Carpenter were engaged in more practical matters; endlessly they reviewed the technical aspects of the trip, and each agreed that to purchase even a handkerchief prior to reaching Edmonton would be unwise, for as Luton said: ‘Stands to reason, don’t it, that those chaps on the frontier will be better informed about arctic conditions than anyone in places like Montreal or Winnipeg.’ They gave much attention to modes of locomotion, and here Luton was determined: ‘I’d say, get to the Athabasca River as soon as possible, no matter the overland portage, and buy a boat there, or even build one, and start floating downstream. Cross the Great Slave and …’
Always Harry broke in at this point: ‘Let’s look at this again, Evelyn. Can we, in common sense, hope to get across the Rocky Mountains, wherever we encounter them, this autumn? I mean, before the rivers freeze?’ While Luton restudied this, Carpenter would add: ‘I’m eager too, you know.’
But when pressed, Harry would state firmly: ‘Evelyn, it’s nearly August. From what I’ve been reading—Whymper says the same—these rivers start to freeze in late September, maybe earlier in the far north.’
‘Then you see no chance for this year?’
Carpenter was the kind of steady, careful man who disliked arbitrary statements; too often he had seen men of great resolve contest the odds and make their own rules, so he avoided giving a direct negative: ‘As we go down the Mackenzie we might hear of some river we don’t know about coming in from the west, hooking up with the Yukon. If we could find that river, we’d be drifting down the Yukon right into Dawson.’
‘You’ve ruled out overland?’
Now Harry had to be firm: ‘Evelyn, old friend, I’ve been looking at the maps. It’s a far distance from Edmonton to Dawson overland. More than a thousand miles, I calculate. Could you and I haul our tons of gear on sleds for that distance in the time available this year?’ Lowering his voice, to indicate the gravity of the decisions he must share, he whispered: ‘I doubt it.’
Drawing upon his experiences with rough travel in Asia and Africa, he knew it would be advantageous if members of the party memorized the terrain between Edmonton and the gold fields, and to that end he conducted study lessons on a table in a corner of the ship’s card room. Here he spread the team’s various maps, and after he had summoned Fogarty from below, the five men pored over sketchy and often inaccurate maps depicting the recollections of former travelers. As Harry compared the maps he noticed one compelling fact: regardless of which route the gold-seekers elected, it would be impossible for them to leave Edmonton and reach the Klondike without at some point climbing and crossing the Rockies. Whatever map he focused upon, it contained that ominous black line coming down from the northwest and running diagonally to the southeast. Even on flat paper, those mountains were a brooding, repellent barrier.
Once when he drew Blythe’s attention to the forbidding line, he noticed that the young poet studied with unusual interest the way it twisted about as if protecting the gold fields from intruders, and later Harry saw the young fellow scratching in his notebook. Always interested in what men younger than himself were engaged in, he asked politely: ‘I say, Trevor, could I have a peek?’ and almost shyly the young man shoved the little book forward with the brief comment: ‘Toying with words. Idea for a poem, maybe,’ and Harry read:
In gathering darkness we pursue
A Grail of Gold protected by jealous elves
Who keep it rimmed by jagged mountains …
‘Fine conceit you have there, Trevor,’ Harry said approvingly. ‘A proper poet could make something of it … polishing … simplifying … don’t you know?’ After he had returned the book he said to the others: ‘I hope the rest of us realize the aptness of what Trevor’s written. He’s got it just about right, you know. We find no gold till we penetrate those mountains.
‘As I consult my maps, and they have a few good ones on this ship, I grow most dubious about these two reports we saw in London.’ He laid before them his copy of the glowing statement by Ludwig Halverson regarding the ease with which one could travel overland from Edmonton to Dawson City and the later one by Etienne Desbordays describing the floating comfort of a trip down the Mackenzie River. ‘This one’—and he indicated the overland trail—‘seems absolutely impossible, regardless of what Halverson says he did. And this one’—pushing aside the Desbordays with contempt—‘has not a word of information that I would consider solid.’
‘Where’s that leave us, Harry?’ Luton asked, and Carpenter said: ‘In a fix. But not one we can’t work our way out of. After all, we know that people are getting to the gold fields. The outflow of gold proves that, and so shall we.’
In cautious, statesmanlike terms Lord Luton stated what their strategy must be: ‘Immediately upon docking in Canada we shall rush by train across the continent to Edmonton, and there make the most penetrating inquiries as to the truth of the two routes. Only when we have more detailed and reliable facts in hand shall we decide our next step, but I assure you of this. We shall get to the gold fields.’ And the other three supported this resolve, with Philip adding: ‘If Yankees can get there in their fashion, we can certainly do the same in ours.’
* * *
None of the team had ever been in Canada, nor had they read much about it. Lord Luton said he knew all that was needed: ‘When the Americans broke away back there, Canadians had sense enough to stand firm.’ By that he meant that they had remained in the Empire, and he could not for the life of him understand why the Americans had not.
‘England has everything a man wants—good government, a king we love or a queen we love even more. Wealth … order … membership in the best group of nations in the world. It will take the Yankees generations to catch up with what they already had, but tossed away.’
He was therefore disposed to like Canada, and when the Parisian started picking its way through the clusters of big islands guarding the entrance to the St. Lawrence River, and then entered the spacious river itself, he said approvingly: ‘What a splendid way to enter a country!’ He felt even more encouraged when the ship passed by the tall cliffs at Quebec City which were surmounted by the gracious Château Frontenac, a new hotel whose reputation had already reached the ears of London society.
‘Marvelous beginning,’ he said, but when they docked at Montreal his ardor diminished, for he saw that he was now in the middle of a society that was completely French, and this he did not approve: ‘I could’ve got to real France by crossing the Channel and saved a bundle. I was on a ship of the right name for that.’ His day in the city was not a happy one, for he felt as if he had been cut off from England and thrust into an alien setting he had not anticipated: ‘Might as well be Albania.’
Trevor Blythe, listening with amusement to Luton’s barrage of acerbic comment, thought: He’s a young man with an old man’s ideas, but since he himself was a guest on the trip, he deemed it best not to speak.
The Englishmen received their first indications of the gold mania that had hit Canada when they hurried to the railway booking office to pick up their tickets: ‘Oh, Your Lordship! You were so wise to cable ahead for reservations. If you hadn’t, I don’t know what we could have done. Hundreds every day clamoring to go west. You’d have found every seat sold till well into next week.’
‘Even first class?’
‘Especially first class. Gold-seekers are happy to pay a premium. They’re convinced that in six weeks they’ll be millionaires.’
Safely aboard the handsome new Canadian train that had recently begun to run uninterruptedly from the Atlantic seacoast to the Pacific, the four Englishmen again received the kind of joyous surprise that made travel a pleasure, for a train of eleven cars, five of them luxurious, was waiting to speed travelers along the first short leg of the journey—Montreal to Ottawa—in maximum comfort. The four Englishmen, of course, were traveling first class, Luton and Carpenter in one delightful bedroom saloon, Trevor and Philip in another, while Fogarty had fairly comfortable sitting space in one of the less expensive cars.
The saloons were handsomely appointed in heavy dark-red upholstery and spacious let-down beds, but it was the long dining car that gained accolades. The compact galley, big enough for two cooks, was forward to protect the car from intrusions by riders in the lesser seats, but the remainder of the car clear to the rear door consisted of tables handsomely draped in thick linen containing along the edges revealed to the public the carefully embroidered initials C.P.R. Tables on one side of the carpeted aisle seated two, the chairs facing, but somewhat larger tables on the other side were for four, and when Henslow first entered the car his immediate impression was of endless white decorated with sparkling glassware and gleaming silver. ‘A car for gentlemen,’ Luton said as he surveyed the place and waited for the head attendant to show him to a table for four.
It was a gala meal intended to display the riches of Canada: seafood from the east coast, rich beef from the prairies, fruits and vegetables from Ontario and desserts from French patisseries in Montreal, all served by two professionally gracious white headwaiters assisted by blacks trained to show professional smiles.
‘This is a grand introduction to Canada,’ Luton said. ‘I hope it’s an omen.’
But as he observed the other diners on this first night of his trip across the continent, he saw so much that perplexed him, so many different styles of dress and speech, that he became bewildered. What troubled him most was the breeziness of the people on the train, their informality, their lack, as he expressed it, ‘of any clear-cut social structure.’ He soon learned that he could not easily determine from what level of society a man came: ‘They all speak the same, bottom to top, no differentiation at all, except for those who’ve obviously had their education in England.’ Men pushed and shoved and paid little deference to those of obviously superior status, and when at Fort William several American travelers boarded the train, even what few proprieties the Canadians did observe seemed to fly out the window.
‘At times,’ he told the two young men, ‘you’d hardly know it was a British colony, everything so jumbled.’
Philip said he was pretty sure Canada wasn’t a colony any longer: ‘Didn’t they have a dominion office in London and all that? And their own prime minister?’
‘If it makes them feel good, such concessions do little harm. But when an Englishman travels in India, for example, everything is so clear. There you are, white skin and all, dress easily recognized, officers in spanking new uniforms, women of all ages carrying on the best traditions of the home country. Sharing the place are the Indians. You can’t miss them. Mind you, some of them can buy and sell the average Englishman, Oxford and all that, and they’ve learned to fit into the finest clubs. But Indians are Indians, and no one ever forgets it, isn’t that right, Harry?’
Carpenter grunted agreement, then said that when he served in the Punjab on the Afghan frontier there were no finer troops than Probyn’s Horse: ‘Mostly Indians, and I never fought with better.’
‘But of course they had English officers?’
‘Yes. But I’ll tell you this, Evelyn, if push should come to shove in Europe, and it might, I would expect a Canadian battalion to give a good account of itself, very good indeed.’ He was struck by the fact that the average Canadian man they were seeing seemed an inch or two taller than men of similar status would have been in England: ‘They’re stout chaps, Evelyn, a new type of Empire man,’ but Luton thought the Canadian women dowdy and lacking in refinement.
‘Travel by these trains isn’t cheap, I can tell you that,’ Luton said, ‘so we’ve got to suppose we’re seeing the best of the crop. Not too impressive, I’m afraid.’
He feared that Canada had probably been corrupted by its proximity to the United States, and whenever he spoke of that massive republic lying just to the south he expressed ambivalent feelings: ‘Man would be an ass not to recognize the accomplishments of those energetic people. Remarkable, really. Fine cities and all that, but you must remember we got them off to a flying start during the hundred and fifty years we guided them. But I’m sure their effect on Canada has been destructive.’
Carpenter, laughing at his friend’s reluctance to accept Canada for what it was, said: ‘Evelyn! On this train you’re enjoying a luxury not surpassed anywhere in Europe. Relax. Enjoy it,’ and Luton raised his glass: ‘To Canada, such as it is!’
Tim Fogarty was having a less opulent trip, for he was riding in what the new railway called a Colonial Car, an ingenious affair containing many little alcoves consisting of facing double seats, with between them enough space for the wooden table which when needed could be dropped from its resting place upright against the wall and returned there when the picnic-style meal was finished. But what pleased the Irishman most were the arrangements for sleeping, for he had soon tired of the endless vistas of lakes and trees his window afforded of the land north of the Great Lakes.
At night the space between the seats was filled in with a structure that also came down from the wall, thus forming, with the facing seats, a fine, level bed, upon which two passengers could sleep in relative comfort, especially if they had been forewarned to bring blankets of some kind. And that wasn’t all. If four people occupied an alcove, the sleeping accommodations for two more were arranged for by an invention which simply delighted Fogarty and which he occupied even during daylight hours.
From a spot high up on the walls came strong link chains which supported the outer edges of bedlike platforms. These were thus suspended, as it were, from the ceiling and passengers could climb onto them with the aid of a little ladder. There, high above the others, they could stretch out, adjust their blankets if they had any, and sleep their way across the continent. What made these upper ledges especially homelike was the fact that in the rear of the car stood a well-designed wood-burning stove on which the travelers could cook such food as they had either brought with them or purchased at one of the many station halts. This meant that there was throughout the car, especially near the ceiling, a constant odor of the normal family kitchen.
The only drawback that Fogarty could detect was that the seats were upholstered in the hardest, shiniest, most unforgiving mock leather, only slightly more resilient than a board, and after even one day’s travel, this unrelenting hardness began to tell.
The trip from Montreal to Edmonton traversed an awesome distance broken into four distinct segments: Montreal to Fort William at the head of Lake Superior, 995 miles in 32 hours; Fort William to Winnipeg, capital of western Canada, 427 miles in 14 hours; Winnipeg to the interesting frontier town of Calgary, 840 miles in 30 hours; and Calgary due north to Edmonton, 192 miles in 11 hours. The trip would thus cover 2,454 miles in 87 hours, without allowance for time in the station, time for refueling and taking on water. Since passengers were eager to avail themselves of hotel or inn accommodations at the terminal points of each segment, the journey took at least six days. This was fortunate, because it enabled Canada to introduce itself by conditioning stages; to have thrown the Englishmen direct from French Montreal to frontier Edmonton would have been too disorienting. To break the journey at little Fort William was advantageous, and the Englishmen noted that in a sense the gold rush began here, for this was the beginning of the western reach of the national railroad, and to it had come prospectors from all parts of Canada and especially from the little feeder railroads that came into Canada from the United States. Here also the big ships that plied the Great Lakes terminated their long runs; the traveler could, if he had the time and money, deviate from the normal rail route which traversed northern Ontario, go instead to Toronto and onward to Windsor on the Detroit River, board a luxurious steamer and spend several delightful days transiting Lakes Huron and Superior, disembarking at Fort William to resume the rail trip west to the Pacific.
In the summer of 1897 a constant horde of gold-seekers boarded the trains at Fort William for Winnipeg and Calgary, and the Luton party, seeing such men close up for the first time, judged them to be an ungainly lot, single men mostly, although some came in groups of three or four from some small town in places like Ohio or Michigan, with an occasional man and wife, the woman always big and strong and capable. A surprising number of the Americans who joined the caravan had been in the United States only briefly; they were Germans and Scandinavians, with now and then an Irishman and very rarely an adventurous Frenchman. They were men on the move, most of them in their late twenties or early thirties, sometimes a few in their grizzled forties and fifties. With their rough clothes, pasteboard suitcases and blunt language they were not an appetizing lot.
Some hours before the Englishmen arrived in Winnipeg, where they rested overnight, their train finally emerged from what had seemed to them an endless landscape of dark trees, still lakes and rock, brightened only by the flash of a silver birch tree and an occasional waterfall. Even Blythe, enamored at first with the wildness of this vast forest, had tired of it during the second day. Now the forest had stopped and the prairie stretched unbroken to the far horizon, and they began to comprehend fully both the immensity of Canada and its radical difference from any other part of the British Empire. ‘It really is a continent,’ Trevor said as he pored over maps, ‘and we’re barely halfway across,’ but Luton dampened this uncritical enthusiasm by asking: ‘Does a thousand miles of empty prairie with no history, no culture, equal a hundred miles in an historical corner like Germany, Holland and Belgium?’ He could express little interest in the vital sprawling new capital of Manitoba, and was unimpressed by the new electric streetcars which rumbled through the city, to the evident pride of its citizens.
West of Winnipeg, when the train halted at towns with names like Moose Jaw, Swift Current and Medicine Hat, the Englishmen saw that the passengers who now boarded the cars bore almost no similarity to types they had known in England and little to those in eastern Canada. Here no one spoke French, and English seemed no more commonly spoken than the foreign tongues of Baltic nations. There were no men’s suits from fashionable London shops. These were men who plowed the prairie, tended cattle, and ran small country stores, and their women looked as competent as their husbands. A surprising number of women were traveling alone or in pairs.
Adding to the jumble of nationalities already on the train were the large numbers of gold-seekers who had come north from the western United States, big uncouth men with squarish faces indicating Slavic origins, or with light-blond hair indicating northern Europeans. Now every car in the train was crowded with would-be miners, many carrying with them all their family goods; the white-and-gold dining car was filled with dialects not heard before, and Fogarty’s Colonial Car was so jammed that he had to share his bed aloft with a Swede who said he came from Montana.
The other Englishmen in his party were amused by the effect of this flood of newcomers on Lord Luton: ‘My word, they’re a vigorous lot! No wonder they wanted to steal Oregon from us and half of Canada. Wonder the old marquess was able to hold them off, because these chaps could fight if they had to.’ Studying the Americans aloofly, he thought: They’re either brash and forward, with no sense of proper social distinctions, or they’re brutish clods recently arrived from some minor European country, little better than the peasants you’d find in any French village. And it irritated him to think that these latter Americans in their rough country clothes were presuming to occupy first-class accommodations, the only ones they were able to obtain on the crowded trains. You’d not find them doing this in England, he thought, and he was increasingly pleased that he had engineered it so that his team could avoid America completely, knowing he’d not feel at ease spending an extended period among such people.
The two young Englishmen, forced to accept what seats were available in the crowded dining car, struck up an easy conversation with their tablemates. ‘I say,’ Trevor asked, ‘where do these people come from?’ and one of the men pointed to one pair of diners after another: ‘They’re German, I happen to know them. That group I would judge to be from a Russian religious group who found refuge near here. The next? They could be anything,’ and he leaned out from the table to ask: ‘Where would you be from?’ but as soon as the man began to speak, Trevor cried: ‘Scandinavian, aren’t you?’ and the man said: ‘Norwegian.’
When Luton’s party disembarked from the main line of the Canadian Pacific in Calgary in order to catch the train to Edmonton, everything changed, for nearly a thousand gold-seekers from all parts of the United States had crowded in to augment the hordes who had streamed in from eastern Canada. When the smaller train started due north to Edmonton, every seat was taken, so three cars normally used for cattle transfers were attached, and more than a hundred people rode the hundred and ninety-two miles to Edmonton standing up, and happy to be doing so.
Lord Luton, surveying this crush of humanity, said: ‘It’s been like the meander of a major river over a long course. Smaller streams keep feeding into it from distant points, until the thing becomes a flood.’ He had scarcely uttered these words when someone heard Fogarty address him as ‘Milord.’ Word flashed through the mob that a real British lord was traveling north. Soon gawking Americans were pushing in to see how a British nobleman looked and more experienced Canadians watched approvingly from a distance.
Seeking refuge, Luton fled to his private saloon, but at dinner several strangers stopped by his table to pay their respects and wish him well. He was so distressed by this that he drew back, took refuge in his silent-sneer, and prayed that the trip would end quickly. Eleven hours later he heard cheering coming from the three cattle cars and looked out to see Edmonton, which had exploded from less than five hundred people last year to more than two thousand in the period since those fatal words were shouted in Seattle: ‘Ship’s in with more than a ton of solid gold!’
Luton’s first impression of Edmonton was of a city of tents, for the gold-seekers had thrown up thousands of temporary canvas dwellings along the flats of the North Saskatchewan River. Shops of every description had mysteriously appeared, most with some bold sign assuring the newcomer that inside these doors he would find all he needed for his forthcoming journey to the Klondike. The burghers of Edmonton reveled in its sudden notoriety, while hawkers pestered strangers on its impromptu streets, seeking to guide them to this shop or that. One man dressed like a carpenter, with overalls and bib containing six pockets for nails, harangued the travelers, and handed out leaflets warning them not to go north without the necessary hardware. He said that a minimal kit could be purchased at his brother’s store for $43, which provided basics such as shovel, pick, whipsaw, hammer, rope, ax, draw-knife, chisel, bucket and gold pan. However, he recommended what he called ‘the complete kit, listed here in detail, more than a hundred and ten necessities, only $125.’ This contained such useful items as a brace and bit, a block and tackle, a magnifying glass and a Dutch oven.
Philip accepted one of the leaflets, and when he returned to the hotel he recommended to his uncle that they buy the $125 assortment, but Luton said: ‘Harry’s doing the buying, and he’s much more practiced in outfitting expeditions than your carpenter friend.’
While the four gentlemen attended to such matters as hardware, Fogarty moved quietly among the Americans and the Edmonton shopkeepers, and as he talked with clerks he began to uncover disquieting news. When he asked who the expert was who had prepared that pamphlet his team had acquired from the Canadian office in London, one sharp-minded fellow working in an outfitting shop asked: ‘What expert?’ and Fogarty said: ‘I think his name was Halverson.’ The clerk sniggered: ‘Oh, him,’ and when Fogarty named the expert on the Mackenzie River, Desbordays, the clerk laughed outright: ‘They’re the same man. Peter Randolph. He works at the newspaper.’
‘Has he ever been to Dawson?’
‘He hasn’t been as far north as the Athabasca River.’
‘What did he do, ask a lot of questions?’
‘About what?’
‘You know, talk with the other men who had been there.’
‘Nobody from here has been anywhere. I mean, down the Mackenzie River a short ways, maybe. On fishing trips, yes.’
‘But to the gold fields?’
‘Nobody. At least not yet. There’s talk that a government expedition might set out next year. But not now, with winter heading in.’
Fogarty, loath to accept such disheartening information, quietly left the outfitter and strolled from one shop to another, asking not proprietors but minor clerks about the trails to the Klondike, and consistently he heard that Peter Randolph had never been out of Edmonton and that no one at present in the town had made the trek to Dawson, for as several pointed out: ‘Dawson wasn’t even there till all this started.’
‘But could they have been to the Klondike?’
‘There was no such place till last year when those Americans gave it that name.’
As Fogarty walked down the dusty back streets of Edmonton, trying to digest his disturbing discoveries, he saw that he must do two things: try to speak with this man Peter Randolph who had written the spurious documents and then inform Lord Luton of his findings. At the office of the town’s newspaper he asked for Randolph, and was told: ‘He doesn’t work here anymore.’ When Fogarty asked: ‘What’s he doing?’ he was told: ‘He’s taken a job giving advice to prospectors at a store that opened last week.’
It took Fogarty a while to find which of the many new businesses had hired this imaginative man, and when he did he presented himself as a solitary would-be prospector. ‘Yes indeed!’ salesman Randolph said enthusiastically. ‘You can get to the fields before the ice freezes everything. We’ll provide you with the best clothing and equipment possible, food supplies too, and with one horse, which you supply, you can make it.’
After Fogarty talked with him for some time, he began to suspect that not one word of what the man said was true. The whole Edmonton operation could be a gigantic fraud engineered by a few rapacious businessmen and a group of inattentive town fathers. It looked as if no one, when these pleasant days of summer were still long, stopped to reason that in sending lone travelers north into the teeth of the oncoming winter, a sentence of death was being pronounced, and that in dispatching even carefully prepared teams like Lord Luton’s, disaster was being invited.
With this partial but frightening information, Fogarty returned to the hotel and told Luton: ‘If you’ll excuse me saying so, Milord, we better get the others.’ When they assembled he said: ‘I think we’re in a trap. The two men who wrote those reports you mention so much, they’re one man, a fellow who’s never been out of Edmonton, not even as far as the Peace River. I’ve been told by many men in town that there’s no way people starting now can get to the gold fields before winter.’
‘Fogarty,’ Luton said, with just a show of irritation, ‘are you certain of all this, or is it just a batch of village rumors?’ and when Fogarty protested that he had checked the veracity of his informants as carefully as possible, Lord Luton cut him short and snapped at Carpenter: ‘Harry, go out there and find out what’s happening.’ While Lord Luton was looking the other way, Fogarty slipped up to Carpenter and whispered: ‘His name’s Peter Randolph. You’ll find him tending shop in that place with the stuffed bear in the window’; and Harry went in search.
He found Randolph eagerly selling equipment to strangers who had no conception of the dangers they would be facing, and he was repelled by the young man’s brazen lies. For nearly half an hour he hung about the edges of the crowd that was eagerly buying Randolph’s gear, listening to the deceptions and correcting them to himself: ‘Dawson’s just to the north, three, four hundred easy miles.’ Must be twelve hundred of hellish difficulty. ‘Seven pleasant weeks before the snow falls should get you there.’ More like seven months, with snow most of the way.
What really terrified him was the information quietly passed him by an Edmonton man who said he was ashamed at what was happening: ‘You look a proper sort. England? I thought so. Believe not a word that one says. He’s never been north of this town. Only one man in history has completed the journey from here to Dawson, trained scout familiar with our climate. Powerful chap, top condition, had the help of Indians, too.’
‘How long did it take him?’
‘A year and two months. Arrived nearly dead.’
‘Then it’s criminal to send these unsuspecting people along such a trail.’
‘It’s worse. It’s murder.’
Rushing back to where Luton waited, Harry said bitterly: ‘Everything Fogarty said is true, Evelyn, except that he discovered only half. Even to attempt an overland trip from here to Dawson would be suicide. And Fogarty was also correct about Randolph. His forged reports are founded on nothing, not a single trip to anywhere, just dreams and willful delusions. Evelyn, this deception is so shocking, I do believe we must warn those gullible fools out there not to attempt such folly.’ He was so statesmanlike, never raising his voice and thinking only of others, that Luton was persuaded that an alarm must be sounded. Before this could be done a wild noise of cheering and whistling flooded their quarters, and all turned out to watch not a tragedy, nor a comedy either, but merely the latest in line of the Edmonton insanities.
A farmer named Fothergill from Kansas, who had made not a fortune but a competence raising corn and feeding it to his hogs, had arrived some days earlier on the train, bringing with him some two dozen large pieces of cargo that he had assembled into what he called ‘the Miracle Machine,’ which would carry him to the Klondike. Basically, it was an agricultural tractor, heavily modified for the gold rush, and on the flat fields of Kansas it might have been a sensation, for it consisted of a sturdy iron-strapped boiler which, when heated by wood chopped along the way, would activate four giant wheels.
‘You’ll notice,’ Fothergill told the admiring crowd, ‘that the wheels are pretty big across. That’s to help them roll over obstacles. You’d be surprised how that helps.’ But then he showed them the secret of his success: ‘Maybe you didn’t notice at first, but look at those spikes fitted into the wheels, and these three dozen extras in the box back here in case one breaks.’
‘What do they do?’ a suspicious Canadian asked, and Fothergill explained: ‘They dig into the soil. Give the contraption a footing and send it forward as neat as you please.’ As he spoke, his eyes shining with expectation of the gold he was going to find, it became obvious to the Englishmen that he had pictured the trail from Edmonton to Dawson as an American prairie, flat and easily negotiated but with a necessary tree here or there, for when one Edmonton man asked: ‘How you goin’ to get it through forests?’ the American replied: ‘We may have to avoid a tree or two, go around maybe.’
And now the time had come to start his drive of more than a thousand miles, with no map, only a few spare parts and just one ax to cut the needed wood. Lord Luton, watching this tremendous folly, whispered to his nephew: ‘Someone ought to halt this madness.’
As the fire below the boiler began to flame, the already heated water started to produce steam, and with a violent creaking of parts the huge machine, capable of carrying twenty men, inched forward, felt its power, and struck out for the modified Edmonton prairie, moving quite splendidly forward with Fothergill in the driver’s seat waving to the cheering watchers. But when, one hundred yards later, the huge spiked wheels encountered a stretch of flat earth where rains had accumulated, the contraption did not proceed onward; instead, the wheels dug themselves ever more deeply into the swampy soil, the big spikes cutting powerfully down and not ahead, so that soon the entire body of the vehicle was sinking into the mire, with all forward progress halted.
Before the confused farmer could halt the supply of power to the four huge wheels, they had dug themselves into a muddy grave from which six mules would not have been able to dislodge them. Dismayed, Fothergill climbed down from his perch, looked at the laughing crowd, and asked: ‘How am I ever going to get this to Dawson?’ By chance, he directed this question to Lord Luton, who drew back as if the man and his stupidity were distasteful, and said: ‘Yes, how indeed?’
Back in quarters, Luton resumed the point that Carpenter had been making when the launching of the miracle machine had interrupted: ‘We must alert these fools to the perils they face if they attempt such nonsense … or even attempt to leave on foot … or with horses.’
For an entire day the four moved among the gold-crazy hordes, warning them that the Halverson and Desbordays documents were fraudulent, but they found themselves powerless to dissuade the starry-eyed travelers. They met two men and a woman who had bought a pony that was expected to carry their entire pack to Dawson. ‘Please, please! Don’t try it!’ Carpenter urged, but even as he spoke the trio set off for a journey that would take them at least a year, if the pony lived, but since Harry was certain it would die before the week was out, he supposed its three owners would also perish.
When he encountered a fine-looking woman in her late thirties who proposed making the entire overland trip on foot, by herself, with a small packet of dried fruits, he lost all patience, and scolded her: ‘Madam, you will be close to death at the end of the first week, and surely dead by the second.’ When she explained, tearfully, that she must have the gold because she had two children in Iowa to support, he made a move which astonished both her and him: He took her in his arms, pushed his heavy mustaches against her face, and kissed her soundly on the cheek: ‘Madam, you’re a handsome woman. And a wonderful mother, I’m sure. But for God’s sake, go back to Iowa. Now!’ And before she could protest, he had given her fifteen Canadian dollars and taken her by the arm to the depot from which she could start her journey home.
Philip Henslow was having an experience that was somewhat similar, but one which would have a surprisingly different outcome. He was strolling idly, asking questions of any strangers who looked as if they might be informed concerning the various routes to Dawson, when he came up behind a woman, probably a good deal older than himself, he thought, who was conspicuous for her outstanding mode of dress. It looked like a modified military uniform made from some sturdy, tightly woven dark cloth: ample skirt but not long, soldier-type jacket but puffy at the shoulders, visored kepilike cap worn at a jaunty angle, heavy, durable shoes and, even though the weather was warm, stout gloves.
He was so taken by this unusual garb that he did something he would never have dared back in England, but the free and almost wild spirit of Edmonton that summer emboldened him. Hurrying ahead to pass her, he turned to ask politely: ‘Ma’am, are you headed north?’
When she looked up to see him, he almost gasped at the total charm of her appearance. She was, as he had guessed, in either her late twenties or earliest thirties, but she had the lithe figure of a teen. Her face was not beautiful in an ordinary sense of flawless complexion, prominent cheekbones and perfectly harmonized features; it was more like that of an eighteenth-century Italian statue of some distinguished matron: gracious, appealing, yet carved from timeless marble and somehow as hard.
She seemed in that first enchanted glance to come from some foreign country, neither Canada nor America and certainly not England, for her hair, which showed handsomely beneath the odd tilt of her kepi, was so light a straw color that it could almost have been called beaten silver. But her salient characteristic was a slow-forming smile which seemed to deliver contradictory messages: ‘Come closer so we can talk,’ but also ‘Stand back so I can calculate who you are.’
From that first brief question of Philip’s she had made the same deduction as he: this one is a foreigner; and in a voice remarkably low and soft she asked in an accent he could not identify: ‘From where do you come?’
‘London.’
‘Heading for the gold fields, yes?’
‘Like everyone else.’
She said: ‘You look like a boy. Too young to be making such a trip,’ but when she saw him wince she quickly added, like a mother wanting to reassure a child: ‘Maybe you have more courage when you’re young.’
‘Have you heard any reports about the overland route to Dawson?’
When she heard these words she actually sucked in her breath and drew back: ‘You’re not thinking of trying that route, are you?’ and when he replied: ‘That’s why our team is out asking questions,’ she actually grabbed his right hand with her two gloved hands and said with a voice of deep concern: ‘Oh, young man! Don’t let them drag you along that path!’
She was so agitated that when Philip asked: ‘Did something terrible happen to you?’ she did an unexpected thing. Turning away from him, she raised her right arm and signaled a group of three men clustered some distance away. Catching the wave of her gloved hand, they hurried to her.
‘He do something to you?’ one of the men, chunky, swarthy-looking fellows in their thirties, asked menacingly, and she held them back with a disarming laugh: ‘No, no! A nice young man from London. He’s asking about going north.’ She introduced the three men: ‘Steno Kozlok, my husband; his brother Marcus, my brother Stanislaus. All farmers from North Dakota, and that includes me.’
‘Why did you call us?’ Steno asked, and from his heavy accent and dark, squarish face Philip deduced that he and the two other men must be immigrants from one of the Slavic countries or perhaps from Russia. The three looked as if they had been hewn foursquare out of some Middle European oak tree, and Philip thought: I’m certainly glad that I didn’t offend her, because if these three came at me …
‘My name is Irina Kozlok,’ she said in softly accented words that seemed to sing.
‘Where are you people from? I mean, before North Dakota?’
‘Ah,’ she laughed, ‘you’d never guess.’ And she said that her husband Steno and his brother Marcus had come from a distant corner of the Austrian Empire. ‘His proper name, Kozlowkowicz, but when we marry I find that no one can spell it or say it, so I made him change it to Kozlok. Now everybody can spell my name.’
‘But you … and your brother?’ Philip asked, and she replied almost teasingly: ‘You would never guess,’ and he said: ‘Well, you do have light hair. His is even lighter. Swedes?’ Again she laughed: ‘Everyone says that. No, we come from a place you never heard of. Estonia.’
‘Ah! But I have heard of it,’ he cried like a child who has solved a puzzle. ‘It’s part of Russia.’
Her smile vanished. ‘It’s Estonia, a part of nothing else. Just Estonia.’ Then, afraid that she had seemed harsh, she said brightly: ‘Men, I want you to tell this nice young Englishman who’s thinking about risking the land route what it would be like.’
As soon as she said this, her three companions stepped close to Philip, all speaking at once, and from the jumble of their words, he knew he was receiving just the kind of information Lord Luton sought: ‘Murderous … they should shoot the son-of-a-bitch sent us that way … no marked trail … you wouldn’t believe how many dead horses rotting in the sun … and you got to ford a dozen streams … snow comes, everyone on that trail freeze to death.’
The young woman stemmed the flood of complaints: ‘They’re telling only half.’
‘You people actually tried the trail?’
‘We did,’ Steno said, and his brother added: ‘But we smart enough to turn back.’ Irina broke in: ‘If your team even thinks about going that way, stop them now.’
‘If we’d’a tried to push on,’ Steno said, ‘we’d’a been snowed in, proper, all winter.’
‘And without heavy clothes or food,’ his wife added.
‘What now?’ Philip asked. ‘Back to North Dakota?’
‘Hell no!’ the three men said almost together. ‘We came for gold. We gonna get it.’
‘How?’
‘Only sensible way. Right down the Mackenzie, haul our boat over the Divide, and into Dawson.’
At this firm point, Irina grasped Philip’s hands again and stared deep into his eyes as she said softly: ‘I’m so glad you stopped me … asked me those questions. Please, please, listen to them. Don’t take that route. If you do, you’ll die.’
This was said with such gravity that Philip was momentarily struck silent. Then he said, with a slight bow to each of his informants: ‘I hope you reach the gold fields, you kind and helpful people from North Dakota,’ and Irina spoke for all when she replied: ‘We intend to.’ Then in a gesture of the brotherhood that linked all gold-seekers that summer in Edmonton, she astonished him by gripping his hand tightly, smiling at him briefly, and repeating in a voice as cold as steel exposed in winter: ‘Do not go the overland route. You’re much too young to die,’ whereupon she reached up and kissed him.
Half expecting her husband to come flying at him, Philip instead heard Steno saying: ‘Listen to her, young fellow. We do,’ and the four trailed off to start their journey to the Mackenzie. As they disappeared in the lingering twilight, Philip, still dazed by that farewell kiss, thought: Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a wife like that, so daring, so quick to laugh, so generous toward other people? I wonder if all women in America are like that?
When Lord Luton’s four investigators reassembled to report their findings, he listened firm-lipped to their distressing news and interrogated each: ‘Did you reach the conclusion by yourself?’ and each told him of the shocking facts that had become so apparent under questioning. Satisfied that they had been honest in their seeking and in their decision that any version of overland travel was insane, he rose abruptly, nodded, and stalked from the room: ‘I’ve got to hear this for myself,’ and into the warm night air he disappeared.
Tall, thin, carefully dressed, with his aquiline nose slightly lifted as if he wished to avoid the smell of the rabble, he poked his way about, remaining aloof from the gold-seekers who had been unable to find quarters and were sleeping on the ground, their belongings piled about them. With brief and restrained questioning he satisfied himself that in all this rabble, no one knew anything, and a profound sadness overtook him: They’re fools who have been deluded by fools, and they’re doomed. When he came upon two men from a small Canadian village who were going to attempt the overland route on bicycles, dragging behind them little wheeled carts holding their gear, he stopped to ask them: ‘What will you use for greatcoats when the blizzards hit?’ and they replied smartly: ‘Oh, we’ll be in Dawson by then.’ He did not try to enlighten them, but his depression increased.
Still moving slowly among them like a recording angel, wise, just and impartial, he muttered again and again: ‘Doomed! That trio won’t survive even into November,’ and he formed a sound resolve that his expedition was not going to plunge blindfolded into such folly: We are men of sound sense, dammit, and we’ll not comport ourselves like idiots.
Just then he saw an older man who seemed to be moving with some purpose, as if he had serious business to attend, even though it was now close to eleven at night, and Luton accosted him: ‘My good fellow, can you help me bring some reason into this madness?’
‘Madness it is,’ the man replied in a heavy Scottish brogue as he surveyed the people sleeping on the ground. ‘What is it you seek?’
‘Answers, answers. How can I and my party get from here to the gold fields and escape the certain devastation that faces these blundering idiots?’
‘You’ve come to the right man,’ the Scot said. ‘I work for the Hudson’s Bay Company and I’m the only one around here who’s made the trip, and because I could rely upon my company’s various caches of supplies, I traveled extremely light. Almost no gear. And I had Dogrib Indians to help part of the way.’
‘How was it?’
‘Wretched. It’s a crime to send untested men north at this time of year. Many will die.’
‘What would you advise?’
‘You look strong and sensible. What of the others in your party?’
‘Young, able.’
‘If I were you, I’d stay here in Edmonton till next June when the ice melts. Then sail down the Mackenzie, a majestic river if ever I saw one, and stay with it almost till it empties into the Arctic Ocean. But stay out of the delta! It’s a wilderness of interwoven streams and small islands. As the delta begins, you’ll find the Peel River entering via the left bank of the Mackenzie. Paddle up it ten or fifteen miles, and you’ll come to the Rat River, feeding in from the west. Go clear to its headwaters, portage over the mountains, not easy but it can be done. There you’ll find the Bell. Drift down it, easy paddling, and in due course you’ll hit the Porcupine, a grand river. Turn right. Keep going downstream, and with no trouble, little paddling, you’ll reach Fort Yukon. And, as the French say, “Voilà!” you’re on the Yukon River where you catch an upriver steamboat which carries you direct to Dawson.’
This good man was so eager to correct the errors perpetrated by other Canadians that with his forefinger he drew in sand a map of the many twists and turns he recommended: ‘It’ll be demanding, but relatively easy doing it this way. Portages, yes, and some paddling upstream, but not excessive.’
When Luton looked down at the map he scowled: ‘We shouldn’t care to use the Yukon steamers. We’ve decided to do it on our own. The challenge and all.’ Then he pointed to the mark that represented Fort Yukon: ‘And under no circumstances would I consider entering the gold field through American territory.’
The Hudson’s Bay man contemplated this rejection, checked his temper, and said quietly: ‘Sir, you interpose conditions that make no sense in this part of the north. I would accept a push from a crippled old woman if it would enable me to complete a difficult journey.’ He bowed stiffly and disappeared into the starry night.
As Luton started back toward his hotel he was diverted by a light in the distance. He moved toward it, hearing a rumble of low voices as if many men were conversing, neither in anger nor in jubilation. When he drew closer he saw a large group of Indians, men and women together, engaged in a midsummer ritual dance, their heads tilted back as if imploring the moon to appear, their feet occupied in a formless shuffle, their arms limp at their sides as if semidetached from their bodies. It was neither an exultant dance, nor one of leaping and shouting, but the number of participants, their steady shuffling movement and their low whispering song was almost narcotic, both to themselves and to those watching.
For many minutes Luton remained in the shadows, unperceived by the dancers but participating in their quiet dance through the swaying of his own body. Even as he followed the rhythm he thought: Savages! I’ve seen them in Africa. And along the Amazon. Same the world over. Halting his swaying, he brought his right thumbnail to his teeth and gnawed at it as he contemplated the hypnotic scene: How many generations before these savages evolve a decent civilization?
His reflections were broken by a man who sidled up from the rear, speaking in broken French: ‘Blackfeet. Most powerful Indians on frontier. Don’t let dancing fool you. Start a fight, two hundred knives at your throat.’
As a cultured Englishman, Luton, of course, spoke French with only a slight accent, and although he resented the Frenchmen of Montreal, he welcomed this man in the wilderness, where, he thought, it was proper for him to be: ‘Why are they in Edmonton? The Indians, I mean?’
‘They’ve been coming here for centuries, they claim. You built Fort Edmonton on their dancing ground, they claim.’
‘Are you a Blackfoot?’
‘Métis. Long time ago, maybe grandfather Blackfoot, father Scotch, they claim.’
‘Your name?’
‘Simon MacGregor.’
‘Scotsman.’ The two watchers fell silent as they watched the monotonous drag-foot dancing of the Blackfoot braves, then Luton asked: ‘Does anything happen in the dance? Should I wait, perhaps?’
‘Just same thing, maybe five hours,’ the Métis said in English.
When Luton whistled at this surprising information, two Indian men heard him, stepped out of the shadows, and almost diffidently asked in broken French: ‘You like dance? You want to join?’ and when he failed to state strongly that he had no desire for such meaningless posturing, they interpreted this as agreement. Politely, almost gravely, they took positions beside him, edging him not toward the shuffling dancers but to a flat area close to where he had been standing, and there they led him in steps which imitated those of the group.
Since the men were dressed in full Blackfoot regalia—decorated deerskin jackets, tight trousers with brightly colored leather tied below the knee, streaks of red and blue down their cheeks—and since Luton’s magisterial bearing showed to advantage between the two braves, they formed a handsome trio. The light from a central fire cast deep romantic shadows across their aquiline faces, prompting the Métis to break into soft applause: ‘Très bien! Les danseurs magnifiques!’
Luton, astonished at what he had let himself into, attempted a few additional movements, but when the men actually laid hands on him, trying to guide him into other proper steps, he pushed them away and fled the scene. Startled, the Indians stared at his departing figure, interpreted his rejection as one more evidence of white man’s ill will, shrugged, and moved off. Luton, once more alone, again could think only of other savage dancers he had seen, and his unease regarding the Indians of Canada increased. If he did not relish his imaginary view of the United States, he felt a similar dislike for Canada’s Indian lands, and with confused reactions to what he had witnessed under the stars he returned to his hotel.
Although it was late when he reached his quarters, he routed out his three companions and dispatched Philip to fetch Fogarty. When all were present he directed Harry to unfold his big map, and proceeded in low, masterful accents to line out a chain of decisions, and as an augury of the good luck he trusted would attend them, the short, crisp directives he issued were exactly right: ‘Under no circumstances will we attempt the overland route and I wish never again to hear a word about it. That leaves us with two alternatives, and I will ask Harry to present them, for on this you have the right to influence the decision. I can survive with either choice.’
Clearing his throat in the deferential manner he affected, Carpenter said: ‘Men, you’ve heard what Evelyn says. The choice is up to us. We can remain here in this bleak outpost village that strives to become a town for seven long months waiting for the Mackenzie to thaw—no libraries, no theater, no music, no decent food—or we leave for the Mackenzie tomorrow, get us a boat, sail her down as far as we can get before it freezes over, and when it is about to freeze, head her into some protected cove and see if we are men enough to brave an arctic winter north of the Circle, hibernating like bears. Let me hear which you prefer? Edmonton for seven months?’ The groans, except from Fogarty, were so loud they were almost palpable. ‘Sail north to the Arctic Circle and test our courage?’ Cheers, to which Lord Luton added: ‘How I would have deplored it if you had voted otherwise.’
Then, asking Harry to move aside, he resumed command of his expedition: ‘Gentlemen, you have chosen a difficult way, but the only way. It can succeed only if we discipline ourselves rigorously. When we are iced up, we scout the land for what timber we can find, driftwood perhaps, and build a kind of hybrid tent-cabin. Total usable space, about like that corner over there. We shall all have tasks. And if we do not have respect one for the other, we shall fail.’
After the four listeners had applauded quietly, he gave final orders: ‘Up at six tomorrow to make your last purchases to sustain us for a year, in case trouble strikes, and each man to provide two good books.’
As the men began to bask in the euphoria of a well-made decision, Carpenter, long trained in subduing alien terrain, felt obliged to bring the team back to reality. Relying upon the map to fortify his points, he reminded everyone of the terrible contradiction of the Mackenzie River: ‘This river, which will hold us prisoner, runs parallel far to the east of the Yukon River, which we want to be on. If we stay on the Mackenzie long enough, we end up in the Arctic Ocean and no good done. We’d be nowhere. So our problem is: At what point heading north do we escape the tyranny of the Mackenzie and head west, to seek the benevolence of the Yukon?’
‘I’ve asked about that, Harry,’ Luton said evenly, ‘and the map is clear. On our way we will pass a score of rivers coming in from the gold-field territory. All we have to do is go up one of them till we encounter a river heading down the other way, and it will carry us right to the Yukon and the gold fields.’
Harry was not finished, for after dipping his finger in a glass of red wine—‘It’s not fit to drink,’ he apologized—he drew a bold line from farthest north in Canada, right on the Beaufort Sea, down into the first shadow of the United States. When he was done he stepped back so that all could see: ‘The Rocky Mountains. High here, low there, very high here, but always present, never to be avoided, not by men or rivers or eagles.’ Looking intently at each of the other men, he said almost ominously: ‘No matter where we go, or how, if we want to reach those gold fields, at some point we must climb with all our gear and maybe even our boats, and cross the Rocky Mountains. There is no avoidance, unless we want to turn back and go in the way the others go, through Alaska.’
Lord Luton, standing very erect, his arms folded behind his back, assumed a posture of command and said softly: ‘We shall sail north on the Mackenzie, find the likeliest river heading west, and the lowest stand of the mountains, and cross over to our target.’ That said, he folded the map and advised his men: ‘Thanks to your common sense, yours too, Fogarty, we have avoided the deadly errors of the land route. May God direct our proper choices on the river.’
In the morning the five men fanned out through the shops of Edmonton, picking up last-minute requirements, including a shovel, two axes and extra ascorbic acid. Two of their purchases would prove significant. Harry Carpenter, having been on safari and trek, sought a store that sold books, where he purchased three volumes, whose covers he promptly tore off, to the dismay of the clerk: Great Expectations, the poems of John Milton and a Bible.
Philip Henslow went to the store with the bear in the window, and there the imaginative Peter Randolph was clerking. The author of the pamphlet for stampedes convinced him he must acquire a special pair of boots for the north.
They were rubber, heavy enough to keep out the cold, Randolph said, and tall enough to reach well above the knee. They were highly polished and created a pleasing seventeenth-century impression when worn with trousers tucked in, but when Carpenter saw them he grew angry: ‘Who sold you such boots?’ Philip would not reply, and Harry became stern: ‘Son, rubber boots like that are for farmers who work in muck. What you need are stout, heavy leather boots like mine, with high lacing.’
‘I like mine,’ Philip said, whereupon Harry took another tack: ‘They do look stout. But one doesn’t wear rubber boots on a journey like this.’
‘They’re waterproof. The man said so. And we’ll be in water a lot, the way we plan to go.’
Carpenter referred the problem to Luton, who chided his nephew: ‘If you want to drag around boots that heavy, so be it. But never say we failed to warn you.’
* * *
In the middle of August 1897, when from all over the world adventurers were heading toward the Klondike, Lord Luton, his three friends and the Irishman Fogarty rode north in two rented Red River carts to intercept the Athabasca River, some ninety miles away. Down this river they would sail in the boat they would order built when they reached the waterway, and because of careful planning by Luton and Carpenter, they would have a fighting chance of reaching the gold fields next June, if they selected wisely among the various rivers leading in from the west.
At about the time they set forth, three men from Australia departed by the overland route, as did a dentist from Salt Lake City and three of his companions. A Frenchman, a Norwegian, two Germans and some fifty men and women from various parts of the United States, as well as many Canadians and two other parties of Englishmen, departed shortly thereafter. None of these adventurers using the land route came anywhere near the Klondike.
One man who left Edmonton in that euphoric summer did so on a farm wagon with huge wheels, pulled by two pairs of goats that he proposed to feed on the browse they would encounter on the way. His effort would end the second week when there was no browse. Another man intended to be hauled along by dogs, and another left Edmonton with only a knapsack and a supply of specially prepared nuts and fruits which he claimed would sustain him till he reached the gold fields in early September. Seventy like them who either had left or were about to leave would perish en route, sad proof that this was a time of general insanity.
Lord Luton had estimated that if his party could cover the relatively easy ninety miles to the Athabasca River, they would find themselves well launched on the great Mackenzie River system. So, anxious to waste not even one day of summer, and never parsimonious, Luton was willing to hire draymen to haul them to Athabasca Landing, but only if it could be done speedily, for he was determined to be among the first to sail north. ‘We really must,’ he told the draymen, ‘put ourselves well down the Mackenzie before it freezes.’
‘It’s ninety-four miles overland, Guv’nor, and at twenty miles a day … you can figure for yourself … more than four days.’
‘Make it three and a half, there’s an extra quid for each of you.’
‘In dollars?’
‘Five Canadian,’ and it was a deal.
In this way they found themselves among the hordes speeding out of Edmonton, and it seemed strange to be so attentive to the freezing of rivers, for this was still summer and they traveled these first miles in their lightest hunting dress. As they passed through lonely settlements the inhabitants, accustomed only to hunting parties, called: ‘Are you after moose or gold?’ and Philip always cried back: ‘Gold!’
On the layover during the third night, Harry Carpenter unfolded the modern map of the Mackenzie he had purchased in Edmonton, and with the ruler he had contributed to the expedition made careful calculations of what lay ahead for them once they entered upon the Mackenzie system at Athabasca. Since he insisted that all members of the team understand the task they were about to attack, he recited mileages carefully: ‘If we can buy a boat of some kind tomorrow, August eighteenth, start sailing immediately and keep our minds to it, we’ll have sixty-four days till the start of normal freeze-up of the Mackenzie. From here to Fort Norman, a probable target, is only eight hundred and sixteen miles as the crow flies, but …’
Philip completed the sentence: ‘We ain’t crows.’
Harry nodded in his direction and said: ‘The winding way we’ll have to go looks to be just over twelve hundred miles,’ and Philip whistled.
‘But wait. If you divide twelve hundred miles by sixty-four days, you get an average distance to be covered of under nineteen miles, and that’s possible.’
Now Luton took over: ‘We have three enormous advantages in our favor. We’re going downstream all the way on a steady and sometimes swift current which would carry us quite a distance each day, even if we did nothing to help. And most of the way we’ll sail with a wind behind us. Most important of all, once we get into our boat, and under sail, we could move north twenty-four hours a day, every day till the freeze.’
‘On those terms we could get to China,’ Philip said, and his uncle continued: ‘Another advantage in our favor is that we don’t have to reach Fort Norman, or any other arbitrary point, for with the careful planning Harry started in London and completed in Edmonton, we can halt wherever we please, erect our cabin, and face the winter with impunity.’
‘Then why hurry so?’ Philip asked, and his uncle had the answer that motivated all the gold-seekers leaving Edmonton in those late days of summer: ‘Because we want to be far down the river next spring, when the ice melts and we’re free to travel again. Gentlemen, the excitement of this trip starts tomorrow, but also the hard work. This will be your last night in a comfortable bed properly made in a very long time. Make the most of it.’
At Athabasca Landing—a collection of several permanent frame houses and an equal number of storage barns belonging to the trade companies—they came upon scores of white tents, indicating that other prospectors had come here for purposes similar to theirs. Luton, offended by the disarray, turned to Carpenter and Fogarty: ‘We know nothing about boats suitable for the Mackenzie. Circulate among these people and determine which would be better, to have a new boat built for us or to buy one already built.’ The two had made only a few inquiries when they found that everyone they asked was directing them to a shack occupied by four hard-working German brothers, the Schnabels, who were whipping out most of the boats going down the Mackenzie that summer.
‘We can build you a sturdy boat for two …’
‘We’re five, bound for Dawson,’ Carpenter said.
‘Just as easy for us.’
‘Have you any already built?’
‘Them two,’ and Luton’s men saw tied to trees along the shore two radically different craft, one a fine big boat about thirty-seven feet long, ample in width and with a small cabin-like shack aft big enough to sleep two. The other was a small, compact craft not half as large as the first.
‘Are they both for sale?’ Carpenter asked, and one of the Germans said: ‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘What do you mean?’ and the German explained: ‘The big one has been ordered by a group of men from Saskatoon who want to trade up and down the Mackenzie. The small one has been built to the specifications mailed us by a dentist from Detroit.’
‘Then they’re both sold.’
‘Not really. We’re ahead of schedule, so if you want them, you get them. We can replace them before the owners get here.’
‘We’ll take the big one,’ and all the Schnabels who heard this decision broke into laughter, and one of them said: ‘Just a minute. Two different boats, two different purposes. Like I explained, the big one is for navigating the Mackenzie …’
‘That’s what we’ll be doing.’
Schnabel ignored him. ‘Only the small one is for going down the Mackenzie and then getting across the Rockies to the gold fields.’
‘What’s the difference?’ Carpenter asked, and when Schnabel replied with only one word: ‘Portage,’ Harry slapped his leg and uttered a self-deriding laugh: ‘How stupid of me. Of course it would be impossible to lug that huge thing anywhere.’
Now he and Fogarty turned their whole attention to the smaller boat, and Harry asked the Germans: ‘Give us honest advice. Would we be better off if we waited till you built us one exactly suited to our purposes? Five of us?’
‘It would be better by this much,’ and when one of the builders indicated with a thumb and forefinger a difference so small it was hardly detectable, Harry said: ‘I’m sure we’ll want this one intended for the dentist, but I must consult with Lord Luton …’
‘A real lord?’
‘Yes, and a fine gentleman,’ and he sent Fogarty running to fetch Evelyn. When Luton arrived the four Germans clustered about him, and one said: ‘We don’t get many real lords up this way,’ and another said: ‘We don’t ever get any,’ then quickly they reviewed for him the crucial difference between buying a big heavy boat intended for permanent duty up and down the Mackenzie and a small, sturdy boat for getting to the gold fields. Before they were finished Luton broke in: ‘We’ll take the small one,’ but then he repeated the question Carpenter had asked: ‘Would we gain anything if we waited for you to build us exactly what we wanted?’ The oldest of the Germans stepped forward: ‘I know what’s in your mind, sir. You think we may be trying to sell this one because we have it already on our hands.’ He chuckled: ‘Look at that crowd. More coming in every day. We can get shed of everything we have by nightfall.’
‘And this one will do us?’
‘It will,’ and the deal was made.
But the Germans were honest workmen and they wanted Luton to be satisfied with his purchase, so they sprang about adding small grace notes to an already fine job—an extra inch of coaming all around, double reinforcement for the housing into which the mast would be stepped when the wind made the use of two small sails practical—and when all was done and Luton and his party were summoned to view it, one Schnabel appeared with a brush and a bucket of paint: ‘Now, what’s her name to be?’ Lord Luton looked about with his two hands raised palms up as if seeking counsel, so Trevor Blythe offered a felicitous suggestion: ‘It must be properly English. Perhaps Sweet Afton, in hopes the Mackenzie will flow gently.’ When everyone applauded, Luton was inspired to invite onlookers in the area to a christening spread of wine, cheese, cigars and such sweetmeats as could be purchased at the Landing. Cracking a bottle of wine against the prow of the little craft, he intoned: ‘This may not be champagne, but I christen this ship Sweet Afton, and may God protect all who sail in her.’
It was the kind of boat the Schnabels had found adapted to the Mackenzie system: flat-bottomed for negotiating rocky rapids, relatively light in weight for the brutal task of portaging, and high-straked to repel waves that often swept the bigger lakes. Well aft, the Schnabels had erected a small, low shack intended primarily for the stowing of gear but also big enough to sleep two, not in comfort. To port of the shack ran a wooden bench providing a position from which the steersman could operate a long sweep to swing the boat from side to side while avoiding rocks in the rapids or the floating logs which menaced ordinary stretches of the river.
The Afton was a craft which summarized much Mackenzie lore, and when the Schnabels turned her over to her new owners, she was about the best that could have been devised for tackling the great, wild river.
As they prepared to embark, Luton was perplexed to find that in addition to the bright-red name of his boat, the Schnabel with the paintbrush had added, at the halfway mark, a thin red line running vertically right across and around the boat, inside and out: ‘What’s that for?’ and the painter explained: ‘To guide you when you’re sawing.’
‘And why would I be sawing?’ and the man called to his brother: ‘Tell him.’
‘Oh, sir, even though you will be sailing down the Mackenzie, your main job will always be to get over the mountains and into the Yukon …’
‘I’ve heard that before,’ Luton said, half smiling at Carpenter.
‘So you must choose one of the rivers that come into the Mackenzie from the west.’
‘I’m aware of that, too.’
‘They’re all serviceable. Liard is quite usable. Gravel can be excellent. But whichever you choose …’
‘I was advised last night by a Hudson’s Bay official to avoid those early rivers and head straight for the delta, and then take …’ Here he produced from his pocket a notebook in which he had written down the complicated tangle of rivers in the extreme north: ‘Peel to the Rat, portage to the Bell, and on to the Porcupine.’
‘The wise ones, old-timers, seem to choose that route. But when you do get safely into the Rat you face situations which force you to saw your boat in half. The little rivers are too winding for the full-length boat to get around the corners. You just cannot manage it, but half a boat twists and turns nicely. And before long, especially with the Rat, the water grows so shallow that you can no longer sail or pole. Then you attach hauling ropes, leave your boat, walk along the bank, and pull her upstream.’
Luton interrupted: ‘But what do we do if there is no bank to walk on?’
‘Then you catch your breath, step down into the cold mountain water, and hike right up the middle of the Rat, hauling your boat behind you. And at that moment you’ll thank us for telling you to saw it in half.’
Another brother said: ‘And of course, when you reach the end of the Rat, you must haul your boat on land over the mountain pass, portage we call it, to the headwaters of the Bell. You do this by hand—strength of your arms and back—and when you’re draggin’ her up that last half-mile ascent, you’ll be damned glad you sawed her.’
Departure was somewhat disrupted by the arrival on horseback from Edmonton of the Detroit dentist, who, when he saw his boat sailing down the Athabasca River, galloped along the bank, shouting: ‘Pirates! That’s my boat!’ but he was mollified by Harry Carpenter, who called back: ‘They’ll build you a better!’
The sail down the three hundred and fifty miles of the Athabasca established a pattern for the entire trip, with Lord Luton, passionately eager to reach some spot far down the Mackenzie before the winter freeze imprisoned the boat, driving his men relentlessly. At the various portages around rapids, where the laden boat had to be hauled over uneven ground, he employed waiting Indians to help, but he himself pulled from the lead position, setting a pace that his four followers sometimes found difficult to match. However, if the distance overland was extensive, it was Fogarty’s dogged strength which kept the Afton crawling forward.
But the regimen that enabled them to cover extraordinary distances, once sailing again, had been established that first night out of Athabasca Landing when Luton refused to pull into shore: ‘Starlit night. Good omen. Keep sailing.’ And they did, with him at the tiller, and thereafter, except when storm prevented, the Sweet Afton forged ahead day and night, piling up remarkable distances. During one spell, an unusually swift current combined with a stiff breeze to push the Afton along at a steady four miles an hour for a day’s run of ninety-six miles. ‘We’re flying!’ Philip cried. But of course, there were those other days at the portages when they were lucky to cover one mile.
The other regimen he established was that on these night expeditions either he or Carpenter must be in charge, with one of the younger men or Fogarty in assistance. By a process of natural selection his partner became Trevor Blythe, and in the dark passages of the night they discussed those things which interested Luton: courage, deportment, sportsmanship, cricket, the responsibility of Englishmen to hold the world together, provided they received occasional help from Germany or Russia. He had little respect for France and practically none for the United States, which as he explained to Blythe. ‘Lacks every virtue we’ve been discussing.’
During daylight runs the travelers learned a great deal about this part of Canada, because what they saw was an endlessly repeated landscape with almost no redeeming features: formless hills, vast expanses of graceless forest, bogs with stagnant water. ‘Not one of my favorite trout streams,’ Luton said as the dismal landscape continued, not for miles but days, without showing signs of improvement. But when they reached the Slave River on the second of September they faced not boredom but real problems, for this short stream contained many rapids, some difficult to navigate, others so impassable as to require exhausting portages. And as each of the wasted days grew markedly shorter, the men had sobering proof that winter was crowding in. However, they were about to encounter a problem of such magnitude that these comparatively petty annoyances were promptly forgotten.
The Great Slave Lake, which those unfamiliar with northern Canada had never heard mentioned, was immense, larger than either of two renowned Great Lakes—Erie and Ontario—and when the Sweet Afton blithely swung into it, the passengers had in mind a pleasant day’s sail, or perhaps two, because the map showed that they would be skirting no more than the southern edge. ‘We won’t see the lake, really,’ Luton told his men, ‘and that’s a pity because it does look a bit of something, doesn’t it?’
They spent six anxious days on the vast lake, covering one hundred and twenty miles, hugging the shore and cringing as sudden gales out of the northwest whipped up waves that should have been expected only in midocean. Navigation became so perilous that only Luton or Carpenter was allowed to steer, but with sails furled they frequently had to seek safety in coves or behind some headland.
Luton was in charge one afternoon when he heard Carpenter shout from his position forward: ‘Evelyn! My God!’ and down upon them crashed a monstrous wave which engulfed everything and required frantic bailing. The Afton pitched and rolled through a nasty six minutes with everyone grabbing for whatever he could reach, but Luton refused to panic, and soon had the little craft righted.
But they had been so beat about that all agreed they should find some projection of land behind which to shelter, and as night approached they spotted a cove protected by spindly trees, and when they neared the shore they saw that another craft, less fortunate than theirs, had been swamped by the storm and thrown upon the rocks, a shattered wreck.
‘No one can be alive,’ Luton said as he surveyed the mournful scene, but when they drew closer they saw one lone figure standing beside the wreckage, signaling frantically, and as the prow of the Afton beached itself, Philip uttered a joyous cry: ‘It’s the girl from Dakota!’ and he leaped ashore to rush toward her as she stood shivering in her drenched uniform. Distraught, she did not recognize him, but realizing that he had come to save her, she threw herself into his arms.
When Lord Luton gently took her away, she told in sobs and whimpers of the disaster that had overtaken their craft: ‘Two long days ago … fearful storm … worse than today … Steno guided well but we didn’t know … When the boat started to break up their first shout was “Save Irina” and they threw me ashore … none of them made it …’ Her voice trailed off, and despite the fact that Luton was trying to hold her, she slipped through his arms and onto the beach, all fortitude gone.
Harry took charge, washing her stained face with lake water while she was still unconscious, then drying her forehead with his sleeve. He directed the others to search the beach to see if any bodies or gear had washed ashore, but there were none. Even before she revived he had the others considering what garments of their own they could lend this castaway, and by the time he had gently slapped her back into consciousness he had arranged for her rejuvenation. When she saw the gifts and realized that she was indeed saved, she broke into tears and asked: ‘How can I dress?’ and she indicated the five men clustered about her, and Harry said in a fatherly voice: ‘I’m married. I have a daughter. I’ll ask the others to go over there,’ and he helped her slip into dry clothing.
When she moved to the beach fire that Fogarty had started, she clasped with two pale hands the mug of tea Trevor Blythe prepared and told her pitiful story: ‘Little money, great hopes. Farming in Dakota poor, poor. A ton of gold … We saw it in the paper and went crazy …’
‘And you ended up,’ Luton asked, interrupting, ‘on the beach alone for two nights?’
‘Yes.’
‘And nothing … nothing washed ashore?’
‘Terrible storm. Everything lost, you can see that.’
‘How did you get to Edmonton in the first place?’ Harry asked, but she avoided the question: ‘At Athabasca those four nice Germans. We hadn’t much money, but they let us have a boat. Not a big one. None of us had ever sailed a boat before, they gave us lessons, and they sold it to us for almost nothing.’ She hesitated. ‘One of the Germans begged me not to go. Said it would be too rough. Told me to go back home, and as we sailed away he crossed himself.’
‘What did you do when you first realized your plight?’ Luton asked, always concerned with human response to disaster, and she said: ‘I cried, I prayed for Steno. I became aware that I had no dry clothes, no food … was completely alone.’
‘I mean, what did you do then?’ and she replied with that solidity of character Philip had noticed that first night when he saw her steel-set eyes: ‘I told myself “Don’t panic. Either they’ll find you or they won’t.” And I jumped up and down trying to keep warm.’
‘Did you panic?’
‘About dawn today. Night didn’t scare me, but when I saw daylight and realized that no one knew where I was, I thought maybe I’d go crazy … nobody … nobody.’
Lord Luton, as head of his expedition, was capable of making swift decisions, and without consulting the others, said: ‘We must move forward before the ice catches us. You can join us, but not stay with us. We’ll try to intercept a trading boat heading south and send you to safety.’
‘What will I do?’
‘In Edmonton, I’m sure they’ll find a way to get you back to Dakota.’
They were astounded by what she said next: ‘No! I came to find gold and I’ll find it,’ and Luton was so appalled by such a statement at such a time that he confronted her fiercely: ‘We’ll have none of that. You escaped death only because we came along. Next time it’ll find you.’ When she lamented the loss of her dreams, Carpenter comforted her, but Luton put a stop: ‘Ma’am, you’ll be on your way back on the first riverboat we intercept, and now I would be obliged if my nephew would utter a brief prayer of thanks for our salvation from the dreadful storm and your rescue from a certain death.’
The storm-tossed gold-seekers bowed their heads as Philip whispered: ‘Dear God, like Peter whom You saved from that storm on the Sea of Galilee, we give thanks for Thy saving us on Great Slave.’ He hesitated: ‘And we give special thanks for saving Thy heroic daughter Irina who survived only because of Thy miracle. Guide us to the safety of the Mackenzie.’
After the amens, Carpenter lifted the young woman into the Sweet Afton, which proceeded without further incident to the exit from the lake. As soon as they were upon the river again, the condition that Philip had alluded to in his prayer took effect: they felt safe and once more in proper hands.
Irina Kozlok remained with them for several troublesome days. Because Lord Luton was determined to forge ahead against the coming of winter, they traveled continuously, and this presented problems about tending to their needs with a woman aboard. Previously the men had adopted simple, sanitary systems, and now they were inhibited, but the ice was broken by Fogarty, who, after he could control himself no longer, finally blurted out: ‘Madam, will you please look the other way?’ and with the quiet ease of a duchess she replied: ‘Gentlemen, I’ve been married. I have brothers. This is no problem,’ and then she added, flashing the first smile since the wreck of her boat: ‘And I’ll expect the same courtesy from you.’
Philip was mortified by this discussion, for like any young romantic he had to believe that it had been more than accident that Irina saved his life in Edmonton, for that is how he now thought of her caution against the overland route, while he had saved hers on the shore of the Great Slave. To himself he mumbled: ‘It was fate,’ and the more he saw of her courageous resolve, and the handsome appearance she made when her uniform was dried and she could wear it again, the more he was reminded of his reaction on that night of their first meeting in Edmonton: Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a wife like that …? and by the end of the second day with her he found himself a confused mixture of pity, admiration and deep attraction. In his infatuation he interpreted her slightest gesture of politeness as reciprocation of his feelings.
The first of the other four team members to recognize that young Philip was falling in love with a woman much older than himself was Lord Luton, and like a true Bradcombe he stiffened, summoning all the traditions of his ancient and distinguished family. The Bradcombes had survived when many other families had crumbled, he reminded himself, because through the centuries they had consistently protected their young men from the snares of attractive French women, and English commoners, and pert Irish lassies and, in recent decades, from the daughters of aspiring American millionaire families. With unerring rectitude they had allowed marriages only with the safest young women from the best English families, and although Luton himself was not yet married, he felt certain that when the time came the elders of his family would identify some young woman of impeccable qualification. He never visualized himself as ‘falling in love,’ but only as ‘getting married’ in the pattern established long ago by the cautious men of his family.
In this context Irina Kozlok was a threat, an uneducated girl … from where was it? He did not care to remember a name like North Dakota. And it was his inherited obligation to see that his nephew, a Bradcombe, did not become entangled with her to any degree more complicated than unlucky chance had already provided. The boy must be prevented from repeating the grave mistake his mother had made. Since Harry was also more or less a Bradcombe, being married to one, Luton enlisted him in his schemes: ‘Harry, we’ve got to get that woman off this boat. To protect young Philip.’
‘Highly sensible, Evelyn. You’ve spotted a real danger.’
‘How far is it to the next settlement … of any kind?’
‘If I recall, Fort Norman. We might make it before the freeze.’
‘And if we don’t?’
‘Seems obvious. We’d be stuck with her through the winter.’
And that afternoon they had real cause for worry, because they heard Irina tell Philip: ‘Those are handsome boots, really, but with that polish they’re more suited for an expensive fishing trip than for mucking about in the arctic.’
‘Do you think so?’ he asked, all eagerness to please, and she said: ‘Indeed I do. What you need are heavy leather boots like mine,’ and when, some time later, he asked his uncle and Carpenter: ‘D’ya think that perhaps I ought to wear leather boots?’ they could scarcely hide their irritation, for back in Edmonton they had lectured him on this very matter and he hadn’t listened. Now this American girl was delivering the same caution but with a smile, and the ninny was beside himself.
Disgusted with his nephew, Luton whispered: ‘Damn me, Harry, we’ve got to do something,’ but what he did not know. During one conversation he told Carpenter: ‘When the others aren’t looking, we could shove her overboard,’ but as the last word left his lips he felt his arm caught in a tight grip and heard Harry’s voice coming at him with unprecedented force: ‘Evelyn! Even to think such a thing in jest is a mortal sin.’ Then, asserting his elder status for the first time on the journey, he said almost menacingly: ‘We’ll have none of that, Evelyn. None, I warn you.’
Shaken by the fury of Harry’s words, Evelyn asked contritely: ‘But what shall we do?’ and Carpenter replied: ‘God obviously sent us to save her, so she’s our obligation until we can rid ourselves of the burden. Good Samaritan and all that.’
But this did not ease Luton’s feelings, which were intensified when he watched as Irina sat forward with Philip, kepi off and the wind blowing her silvery hair attractively about her face. Her little gestures in pushing it back were, Luton thought, so damned Slavic she could be a Russian princess, and then he found himself speculating on whether Estonians were Slavs; he decided they weren’t.
He was not merely frustrated; as leader of an expedition and at present the captain of a ship, small though it was, he could not stop himself from reviewing scenes from British naval history in which disruptive forces had destroyed otherwise solid explorations, and in his distress he called Harry aft for a serious consultation: ‘Have you ever read the old accounts of how this chap Bligh, an untidy sort, lost his ship that had been commissioned to carry breadfruit from Tahiti to Jamaica?’
‘Of course.’
‘What did him in? Native girls corrupting his sailors. And did you follow what happened when the mutineers fled to that tiny island somewhere?’
Harry hadn’t, for that part of the old naval tragedy was not so well known, but Luton had: ‘Same thing. The English sailors handled things quite well, really, if you forgive them their mutiny, but they fell to squabbling over native girls, and I believe they killed one another. None survived.’
The two veterans contemplated this for some moments, agreeing that to have any woman penned up with five men in a small cabin over a prolonged winter was running a risk that was formidable, and, said Luton, pointing forward to where Irina’s silvery hair was once more tumbling about in the wind: ‘To have that particular one amongst us would be suicidal. I could see Philip and Trevor battling for her at first, and ultimately, believe me, you and I would be at it. And she would sit there all the while in the corner of the hut like some Circe, smiling and combing her hair and plotting to turn us into her swine.’ His fear of what Irina might very possibly do had generated a hatred so intense that he could not think rationally.
Nor did she help. Eager to prove to the men that she would not be a hindrance to their voyage, she kept discovering ways to be helpful and performed more than her share of the tasks: she prepared the meals once Harry laid out the rations that only he controlled; she cleaned up afterward; she was remarkably alert in moving out of the way if the men had duties in adjusting the sails; and regardless of what she did, she maintained her appearance of responsible gravity, broken now and then by that ravishing smile which seemed to fill her entire squarish face. In short, she made herself an ideal passenger.
For Lord Luton that was the problem, because he could see that her impeccable behavior was winning over not only youthful and impressionable Trevor Blythe, who read her poems from Palgrave, but also Harry Carpenter, a married man who should have known better. After carrying out her voluntary duties, she would move to the front of the boat, ‘where everyone has to look at her,’ Luton grumbled to himself, ‘and take off her kepi, allowing her beautiful hair to dance in the breeze.’ At such moments he saw her as one of the Sirens, perched not on the prow of his boat but on a jagged rock toward which she was luring his men to their destruction; he imagined she carried a lyre which she strummed as she worked her charms.
Even Fogarty proved susceptible, and one evening Luton caught him staring as she fixed her hair, his eyes glazed over. ‘Fogarty!’ Luton cried snappishly. ‘Tend the sails!’ The Irishman’s response was most unfortunate: ‘She does remind me of me wife, Jenny.’ Luton, infuriated, wanted to cuff some sense into his ghillie, but controlled his temper, muttering: ‘Him too?’
Realizing that only he was impervious to her seductive plotting, he resumed his study of ways to dispose of her: I could maroon her at some promontory where the trading ships would have to see her; of course we’d leave food for her. But I doubt the men would permit this. Or when we make camp, we could build a little hut for her, off to one side. But I’m sure the others would sneak over there at night, after I was asleep. And then came that hideous image, of pushing her off the Afton on some dark night, and the others running about: ‘Where is she? What could have happened?’ This hateful nightmare he tried to chase out of his mind, but he was powerless to exorcise it.
Reprieve came in the sudden appearance on the Mackenzie of a sizable river steamer hurrying back to civilization at the completion of her last trading trip of the brief summer season, and when Luton signaled frantically, her captain hove to while the men in the Afton explained how they happened to have a castaway woman aboard: ‘Bunch of Dakota farmers wrecked their craft at Great Slave. You’re to take her back to Athabasca so she can go on down to Edmonton and on to her home.’ When the captain asked: ‘Who pays her fare?’ Lord Luton with indecent haste leaped forward to cry ‘I do!’ and he gave the captain not only the requested fare but also a bonus of five dollars. While this was happening, Carpenter quietly slipped Irina a handful of bills and a fatherly admonition: ‘Go back to Dakota, Irina. Give up your dreams of gold.’
In gratitude she went to each of her saviors in turn and kissed him. When she reached Philip he blushed furiously, but the reaction was quite different when she came at last to Lord Luton. Stiffly, with his best silent-sneer, he drew back, refused to kiss her but did accept from a proper distance her warm handshake.
Ignoring this rejection, she transferred to the larger ship, and after reaching down for her tiny package of clothes the men had given her, she remained at the railing as the two craft separated there in the center of the great river, with never a tree or a hut visible. As Philip watched her slowly vanish upstream, his heart felt a heaviness it had not known before. He acknowledged to himself that she was much older than he, and that she was an American of uncertain lineage, but he also knew that she was a vibrant, heroic woman with a sense of humor and compassion, and he was aware that her naturalness had overwhelmed him. But his two older companions who were watching him closely, Evelyn and Harry, knew from their own experiences as young men that this sense of romantic tragedy would pass. It always did.
Luton and his party continued their journey on the Mackenzie without seeing one evidence of human habitation and scarcely a sign that others had ever passed this way. As they stared at the banks lined with increasingly dwarfed trees they agreed that this was indeed one of the ends of the earth.
When they finally turned northwest for the climactic run of nearly seven hundred miles to the delta, they had an opportunity to see the great river at its most powerful; at times it broadened out to two or three miles, until Philip and Trevor thought they were entering another lake, but then it would contract into a swift-moving channel. The vistas were endless and the loneliness almost terrifying, but the grandest part came during the night runs when occasionally the heavens would be charged with electricity as the enormous northern lights filled the sky with luminous patterns.
One night as Luton and Trevor Blythe tended the craft while the others slept in the little deckhouse, the display lasted for three breathless hours, at the end of which Trevor said: ‘I’ve headed a new page in my notebook Borealis. Wouldn’t that be a wizard title for a small book of poems about the arctic?’
Now Luton’s party became willful players in one of the most tantalizing and fatal games of geography. Always aware that the Mackenzie was running roughly parallel to their target river, the Yukon, which lay a constant three or four hundred miles to the west, they asked continually: ‘Where will it be most practical for us to leave the Mackenzie and leapfrog over to the Yukon, which we can then use to float down to Dawson or row up, depending upon where we make our interception?’
The variables in this game were many, for numerous inviting streams, some considerable rivers, joined the Mackenzie from the west, and if one paddled and portaged upstream to their headwaters, one would be close to some other stream which dropped down to the Yukon. But even the most inviting route posed two harsh requirements. It would be murderously hard to row upstream against the current, and when one did reach the headwater, one still had to portage a heavy boat and all gear over the Continental Divide, as Harry Carpenter had pointed out repeatedly and kept reminding them as they drifted north.
Now the travelers entered into a kind of hypnotic trance which rendered sensible decisions impossible, for even though they knew that winter was approaching, the days remained tantalizingly inviting, and often they sailed with no covering but their flimsy shirts. The sun continued visible and warm, and the mighty river itself almost lulled them to sleep, so purposefully did it seduce them northward, always bearing them closer to the Arctic Circle. It ran so steadily, its current was so smooth and rapid that it seemed to sing: ‘I’m not luring you away from the gold fields; I’m carrying you always closer to the goal.’ But the goal to which it was speeding them was the river’s goal, the arctic, and not the men’s.
Every man aboard the Sweet Afton was aware of two conditions. Winter was perilously close, requiring them to find a place to pitch camp and dig in for seven or eight months, and they were drifting along without the courage to make a hard decision as to how they were to survive the winter and then get across to the Yukon. They were men morally disarmed by the vastness of the north, the complexity of the decisions they must make, and the sweet seduction of the Mackenzie. ‘We must soon make up our minds,’ Lord Luton said several times at sunset, as if on the morrow he would force a decision, but when day broke, and the peaceful river rolled northward, it carried them along, and decision was postponed.
The apt simile for their curious behavior came, as might have been expected, from poet Trevor: ‘We go forth, like all significant voyagers, in quest of our Holy Grail, but we approach it by running away, as if we were afraid to challenge the rim of Dark Mountain behind which it hides in self-protection.’
Toward twilight on a day in October, Luton was inspecting carefully a stream which debouched into the Mackenzie from the west, and after some minutes of close study he said: ‘I do believe it’s got to be the Gravel.’ Everyone crowded the port side to see this ominous yet fortuitous river, for they knew that it was the last viable escape route to choose if they wished to avoid the difficult tangle of rivers at the delta, where the Mackenzie would finally break through to the Beaufort Sea.
If they elected to leave the Mackenzie here and row up the Gravel, they would encounter at its headwaters the easiest portage over the Rockies and a fine free-flowing river, the Stewart, to whisk them down to Dawson in the spring. Lord Luton, aware of the amiable possibilities, cried: ‘We’ll anchor in her mouth tonight and decide in the morning whether to keep drifting down the Mackenzie,’ and his men steered the Sweet Afton hard to port and into the Gravel for an overnight stay and some tough decision-making in the morning.
But that harsh obligation could once more be postponed because as soon as it was light Harry Carpenter announced: ‘I think our spot for the winter has been chosen for us.’ And when the others looked, they saw that the edges of both the large river and small had begun to freeze. The ice did not yet reach out far from shore but frail fingers did enclose their boat, a stern warning that soon the entire system would be frozen.
‘Well!’ Luton said as he studied the situation. ‘This comes a mite sooner than I had intended. I was so eager to have us reach Fort Norman. It can’t be more than eighty miles downstream.’
‘Milord,’ Harry said, and by using his friend’s formal title he indicated the gravity of what he had to say, ‘you’re right. It is only a few miles to Norman. But in Edmonton and Athabasca, too, they warned us that the Mackenzie can freeze like that,’ and he snapped his fingers. ‘If we were to be trapped in the middle of this powerful river, with blocks of ice crushing down upon us, we could vanish in the midst of some floe, with our boat reduced to kindling.’
Luton required only a few moments to appreciate the inevitability of this judgment: ‘We’ll build our cabin a hundred yards up the Gravel. To escape the ice.’ So, aided by long ropes carried ashore and tied to trees, the men warped the Sweet Afton out of the larger river and berthed her safely a short distance up the left bank of the Gravel.
Ironically, Luton had been forced to choose the Gravel, after all, but he was putting it to the wrong use, a haven for the winter rather than a highway westward toward the safety of the Yukon.
