First, the obligatory geography lesson: The Klondike was not, is not, and never will be in Alaska. Rather, its richest diggings were a good sixty miles east of the international boundary, well within Canada’s Yukon Territory. Somehow, in all the excitement of the rush, that fact was lost upon tens of thousands of would-be tycoons until they came face-to-face with Canadian Mounties manning Maxim machine guns atop the Chilkoot and White Passes. Canada was not about to let the customs duties on goods entering the country escape its coffers, any more than it was going to let its gold slip away down the Yukon without a tax.
Thus, the story of the Klondike and its legends of Charley Anderson, “the Lucky Swede” who bought a million-dollar claim while drunk; Clarence Berry, one of the very few who took out a fortune and managed to die with it intact; “Swiftwater Bill” Gates, who bought up every egg in Dawson because of a woman; and many more—all belong to the Yukon Territory. The Klondike story that belongs to Alaska is that of the amazing routes these argonauts cut across its rugged landscape in order to reach, or at least attempt to reach, this beckoning Eldorado. The more realistic avenues, including the Yukon River and the routes over the Chilkoot and White Passes, would nurture the growth of Skagway, Valdez, and the general commercial development of the territory.
There were many routes to the Klondike, but why were there so many people on these trails? Why this last great rush? What made businessmen in New York and Chicago, schoolteachers in Omaha and Seattle, and budding young Ivy Leaguers up and quit their vocations and join the rush as readily as did newly arrived immigrants, down-on-their-luck farmers, and restless miners who had been on the trail of the mining frontier for decades? By one estimate, between July 1897, when the treasure ships arrived on the West Coast, and the following spring, as many as 50,000 people may have started on the trails to the north.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, a number of phenomena came together to spark this exodus of biblical proportions. For one thing, there was a lot of gold. The phrase “a ton of gold” played well in the yellow journalism of the time, but the truth was that, claim for claim, the Klondike ground was rich indeed. According to one source, $150 million in gold was taken from its mines.9 (A ton of gold at the average 1897 price of $20.67 per ounce would have been worth $661,440.) And gold was definitely going to be the currency of the next century. Just the year before, William Jennings Bryan flamboyantly swore not to crucify mankind on a cross of gold, but William McKinley won the presidential election of 1896 and made it clear that gold would be the monetary standard of the future. For many still reeling from the Panic of 1893, which had been triggered by the demonitarization of silver, the golden glitter of the Klondike was a way back.
Then, too, by 1897 the mining frontier had pretty well completed its crisscrossed journey about the American West. From California in 1848 to the most recent strikes at Cripple Creek in the shadow of Colorado’s Pikes Peak, the easy ground had been covered. The Klondike might just be the last chance to get rich quick.
Finally, one cannot help but speculate that while the gold was certainly important, this was the last great fling of a generation that sensed that the adventure and excitement of the American West was passing from the scene forever. For many it was, as Robert Service later wrote in “The Spell of the Yukon,” “not the gold we were after, so much as just finding the gold.”
And so, to paraphrase Service, into the northland they pressed. Clarence Berry warned that it would not be easy. Upon stepping off the Portland in Seattle, Berry was quoted as saying: “The country is wild, rough, and full of hardships for those unused to the rigors of Arctic winters. If a man makes a fortune, he is liable to earn it by severe hardship and sufferings. But then, grit, perseverance, and luck will probably reward a hard worker with a comfortable income for life.”10
Within days of Clarence Berry uttering those words, tens of thousands of gold seekers, their thoughts focused only on Berry’s last phrase—“a comfortable income for life”—were bound for the handful of creeks emptying into the Klondike River deep in Canada’s Yukon Territory. There was no one route to the Klondike. Indeed, the winter of 1897–98 found Klondike stampeders spread out across the entire northwestern part of the North American continent on a dozen or more routes—all arduous, some downright insane. But from Seattle, Washington, Vancouver, British Columbia, Edmonton, Alberta, and many lesser jumping-off points, the multitudes surged north to the Arctic.
Despite the many routes to the Klondike, the collective experience of this last great gold rush would come to be symbolized by a photograph of a long, single-file line of humanity, struggling upward under incredible weight to reach the summit of Chilkoot Pass. Long before each person in turn reached the top, the reality of the rest of Clarence Berry’s words had sunk in.
Chilkoot Pass had been used for centuries by Tlingit as a trading route between the coast and the upper Yukon River basin. After sailing from Seattle or other points to the port of Dyea at the head of Lynn Canal, one headed north up the Taiya River drainage to Chilkoot’s 3,525-foot summit and then descended north into Canada to Lakes Lindeman and Bennett. The trip itself was difficult enough, but once Dawson’s limited supplies began to run low, Mounties atop the pass required that each person entering Canada have at least a year’s supply of food—the equivalent of about a ton, or 2,000 pounds. This meant that travelers were obliged to walk the Chilkoot not once, but ten, twenty, or thirty times, hauling their supplies to the top in stages. Once on the shores of either Lake Lindeman or Lake Bennett, stampeders built boats, waited for the ice to go out, and then sailed and floated down 550 or so miles of the Yukon to Dawson, braving Miles Canyon and Five Finger Rapids in the process.
It was not a route for the faint of heart. One stampeder confided to his diary: “On the road down canyon this A.M. we met a Missouri acquaintance (of boat trip) who was going back to his family, having sold out his share to his partners, and saying to us, ‘I’ve had all I want of this country and am going back to my family and stay there.’ There are several more like him, becoming discouraged at the last greatest tug and who sell out for a song.”11
There were plenty of women on the trail, too. One was Inga Sjolseth, who started north from Seattle on March 9, 1898, on board the steamship Farallon in the company of a group of Norwegian immigrants. Arriving in Dyea a week later, Inga’s party set up camp on one of the sandbars near the Taiya River while they organized their supplies for the trip ahead. Then began the painstaking work of ferrying loads up the trail. On March 29, Inga wrote in her diary:
Today we moved from Canyon City to Sheep Camp. The trail in from Canyon is narrow and crowded, lying between two steep mountains. If one looks up one sees only mountains over one’s head. The snow has turned to water, so progress has been very difficult. Ida and I pulled a loaded sled together through the canyon and heard many comments about it. We heard one man say he wished he had had such a “tram” as we were. Some of the men took off their packs and laughed at us. We have now set up our tent here in Sheep Camp. The snow is thick under our tent.12
Spring snows continued to fall. A few days later, Inga was still at Sheep Camp when the deadly Palm Sunday avalanche roared across the trail just north of the camp and buried a long line of stampeders in its path. About sixty (reports of the exact number vary) died in the disaster, and many were buried in what came to be called Slide Cemetery in Dyea. The snows continued, but so did the long line working its way toward the summit.
Finally, after days of poor weather and feeling poorly herself, it was time for Inga to leave Sheep Camp and cross the pass. A little horse, barely alive, hauled a sled with some of her supplies up to the Scales, where goods were weighed and from where she could see the long line leading to the summit. The upward line plodded along ever so slowly, but the downhill route—for those who had cached supplies at the summit and were coming down for another load—was like a toboggan run. Most sat down and slid down on their bottoms, going so fast that Inga claimed she was afraid to watch. When her group’s load of supplies finally went over, she was too afraid to accompany it, and so she returned to Sheep Camp.
While waiting for another attempt, Inga washed socks, baked bread, and made pea soup and bread pudding for dinner one evening. One of the single men of the party, Henry Kolloen, delivered a letter to her from a Mr. Sandvig. It was written on a piece of board, and Inga noted in her diary that “this is the kind of letters one receives here in Alaska.” Perhaps Sandvig was urging her to make the journey over the pass and catch up so that he could take advantage of some of that cooking. In any event, it was Kolloen that she later married. A week later, her courage up, she made the trip across the pass and arrived at a camp on Lake Lindeman. Even in a howling gale, entrepreneurs were busy at the summit selling tea for ten cents per cup.
Inga’s group remained at Lake Lindeman for the better part of two months, while boats were built on Lake Bennett for the journey down the Yukon. During this time, Lindeman was a thriving city of tents, complete with evening entertainment and Sunday church services. Some of the hardships were taken matter-of-factly. Inga wrote at some length in her diary about selling a stove for Sandvig and then succinctly reported that “four men drowned in Lake Bennett today.”
By May 28, the ice had broken up on Lake Lindeman and was crashing in great masses down the connecting stream to Lake Bennett. Most boats negotiated this passage safely, but a few smashed into the large rocks and broke apart—the results of weeks of labor gone to pieces within a mile of the start of the water leg. Inga’s group was among those who built boats on Bennett to avoid just such an uncertainty.
On June 14, the boats were ready. Inga’s group hired a team to transport their gear from Lindeman to Bennett, loaded the boats, and tried to sail north into a ferocious afternoon wind. When headway proved difficult at best, they put back into shore and did what Alaskan adventurers still do in such circumstances: They made a pot of coffee and, in Inga’s words, “drank it.”
The next day was still blustery, but with a following wind, and they made good time to Tagish House, where they had the luxury of sleeping in bunks. A few days later when they were back in the open, the mosquitoes were so bad that they couldn’t sleep. Inga got up at 1:00 A.M. and cooked rice. By 3:30, everyone was up and soon under way. They arrived in Dawson on June 26, just twelve days after departing Lake Bennett. Inga went on to marry Henry Kolloen and later worked several placer claims with him.
If one didn’t like the looks of the Chilkoot, the White Pass route took one to almost the same place on Lake Bennett. The White Pass route ran from the port of Skagway, a nearby competitor of Dyea, north up the valley of the Skagway River. It followed the White Pass Fork of the Skagway River to the 2,915-foot summit of White Pass before descending to Lake Bennett and joining the Chilkoot route. At first blush, the White Pass looked deceptively easy, particularly given its lower elevation than the Chilkoot. Perhaps that is why more than 5,000 tried it that first winter of 1897–98.
After a relatively easy beginning out of Skagway, the trail encountered the slippery slate cliffs of Devil’s Hill, the boulders of Porcupine Hill, and the liquid mud of the 1,000-foot climb to Summit Hill. Once in Canada—here, too, Mounties imposed a year’s-supply-of-food quota per person—the trail skirted a myriad of lakes and crossed two more divides before reaching Lake Bennett. Soon the trail was littered with the carcasses of hundreds of horses brought from Seattle or Vancouver by steamer, but no match for the tough terrain and twenty-four-hour days of packing they were driven to. “The horses died like mosquitoes in the first frost and from Skagway to Bennett they rotted in heaps,” wrote Jack London.13 No wonder the White Pass route was known as the Dead Horse Trail.
Despite such grim scenes, Stewart Campbell chose to try his luck with the White Pass route. He and his party left Kalamazoo, Michigan, on January 26, 1898. His group of businessmen exemplified the fact that stampeders came from all walks of life and were not ruffians at the fringe of society—even if the rigors of the trail might turn some that way in due course. Taking the train to Chicago, Campbell and his cohorts celebrated their first evening at the Chicago Opera House. In Seattle, they nearly got into a scrap at the depot when the freight agent attempted to charge them $448 in excess weight. That they settled the matter for only $64 suggests that there were folks “panning for gold” all along the trail, not just in the diggings.
Seattle was rainy, but bustling with carloads of people and freight arriving all of the time. Campbell’s party bought the last of their provisions, including a span of horses, hay and oats, and even some lumber, and then sailed north. By February 15, they were in Skagway, taking meals at the Waldorf Restaurant at one dollar per man per day.
Then they were faced with the prospect of moving twenty-five tons of supplies over what Campbell called “the liveliest gold trail in the world: Horses, mules, jacks, bulls, oxen, cows, goats, dogs, men, women, children, with sleds, packs and every conceivable mode of conveyance zigzagging along a narrow trail (or path) over rocks, between and under rocks, over ice pole and brush, bridges, breaking through now and then and again killing a horse or dog here and there and a continual sound of mush, mush all the time.”14 Two of Campbell’s party opted out early, concluding that the trail looked too tough for them.
By March 8, they had only three or four loads left in the lower camp. Campbell was a Scot who was frugal with words both in his diary and on the trail. “Man killed lying on his sleigh a little above Porcupine Hill. Looks like murder. Shot from behind,” reads one entry. Then there was the inevitable clash of temperaments in this harsh environment. Campbell wrote of one of his party: “Evers thinks he is only man knows anything about setting up tents. Thinks I don’t know anything about it at least.”15
All along the snowpacked trail were the grisly carcasses of dead horses from the previous fall, as well as new ones that had dropped under the strain. A week later, the weather was warm, but they were still hauling to the summit. On March 16, three of the party went ahead to Log Cabin, a collection of huts over the pass, to prepare a camp. The rest put paraffin sacks over their goods to try to keep out the snow and wet and continued to pack loads toward the summit. Four days later, Campbell got an early start for the summit and made it to the camp at Log Cabin after what he called “a long tramp.”
Then the weather changed. March 22 was the stormiest day yet—typical spring storms blowing snow as hard as nails across the pass. Campbell’s party kept to camp, where, according to Campbell, “Doyle does nothing but figure how long the oats will last” and “Evers makes bread like grindstone.” If it seemed a burden to buy hay and oats in Seattle and pack them this far, the economics of the rush showed the reason. Hay was selling for about $15 per bale, comparable a century later to a staggering $300 in 1998 dollars.
The next job was to fell trees and build a boat. Campbell’s party spent more than two months in the process, and it too, like packing on the trail, could strain the nerves of the best of friends. Perhaps the worst team sport was whipsawing logs. The man in the pit was always choking with sawdust and certain that he was pulling harder than the man on top. Campell’s diary tells a great deal in a few words:
Mon. Apr. 11, ’98
Still cutting logs. Had good feed of beefsteak today. Getting to be an expert at making biscuit.
Tues. May 3, ’98
Light from 3:00 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. Weather fine. Doyle exhibits his brains every day.
Sat. May 7, ’98
Boiler expert tackles the thing [sawmill] today. No go. Doyle sprained his ankle. Pity it wasn’t his neck.
Mon. May 9, ’98
A Mrs. Howe buried at end of lake. 72 years old.
Mon. May 16, ’98
Working on boat. Doyle comes around once in awhile. Tells us what a fellow told him in regard to building boats.
Thurs. May 26, ’98
Working on steamer. Young man by name of Fred Whitcomb of Kerne, New Hampshire accidentally shot himself a short distance from us.
Fri. May 27, ’98
Corking steamer today, at least the men are. Greendyke and I are building wheel. Whitcomb was buried today by the Masons.
Sun. May 29, ’98
Took several pictures today. One, of the graves at head of lake. One, of the water front with all the boats lined on the shore. Also one of the saw mill. One of line of boats going down lakes for Bennett, belonging to Racine.
Wed. June 1, ’98
Fire breaks out at the head of lake and sweeps through the woods like a race horse. We will have to move out whether we want to or not. Pulled our goods all out on beach and sleep for the night on the beach. Took picture of the finest cloud effect I ever saw in my life, caused by the fire.
Fri. June 3, ’98
Loaded everything into boats today for an early morning start on unknown waters to the land of gold.16
Campbell and his party made it down the Yukon to Dawson and spent the following winter and much of the next spring picking away at the ground without much success. Doyle continued to be a rascal and then an outright thief. By the summer of 1899, Campbell had been away from home for over eighteen months. After cutting some timber and selling it to a local sawmill, Campbell earned $141, which he put toward the passage south. One of his last diary entries from Dawson notes, “A boat load of Anuiser Busch [sic] beer just arrived today and it tasted finer than cream.”17 Less than a month later, Campbell was back home in Kalamazoo, Michigan. A cold beer, a thousand hardships, and maybe a million memories were all he had to show from the trail of ’98.
For those who were not inclined to the rigors of Chilkoot or White Passes, there was an easier alternative. The Yukon River was the rich man’s route, available to those who could afford the relative luxury of a steamship cruise—even if one might be expected to help cut wood for fuel once on the river. To be sure, it was the long way around. First, 3,000 miles from Seattle to St. Michael near the mouth of the Yukon and then 1,700 miles more up the river to Dawson on board one of a number of hastily constructed little steamers. In theory, the advantage was that one was able to ride all of the way. The disadvantage, of course, was the short navigation season on the river. Once the Yukon froze in the fall, the steamers were stuck until the ice went out sometime in the spring.
The fall of 1897 found a flurry of activity on the Yukon. Those who had struck it rich during the summer, or some who were just calling it quits, were desperately trying to escape downriver. Just as desperate were the crowds they met trying to get upriver and make it to Dawson. Only a handful who started up the Yukon in the fall of 1897 managed to reach Dawson before the freeze-up, and winter found hundreds of stampeders marooned along the length of the river. One group that included the mayor of Seattle ended up in a cluster of shacks that the disgruntled called Suckerville. The mayor had stocked up on goods, which he planned to sell in Dawson at sky-high Dawson prices. In Suckerville that winter, his companions forced him to sell to them—at Seattle prices. One stampeder who made it as far as Circle later wrote, “We were all monomaniacs on the subject of getting to Dawson.” After a winter on the river, those who didn’t turn back finally made it to Dawson in July 1898, long after the best claims had been staked.18
So the promise of the “easy” river route did not hold true, but what about the lure of an “all-American” route that promised to avoid Canadian customs officials? According to some hastily produced and utterly unreliable guidebooks, the solution to dealing with Canadian customs officials was to reach the Klondike through “American” Alaska. That seemed patriotic enough. Never mind that sooner or later one still had to enter Canada—that fact was conveniently overlooked by those promoting the route.
One version of the all-American route led north from Valdez on Prince William Sound, across the Valdez Glacier, down the gorge of the Klutina River to the Copper River, up the Copper and over Mentasta Pass to the Tanana River, on to the headwaters of the Fortymile, and then down the Fortymile to the Yukon, before ascending the Yukon to Dawson. It looked like a fairly straight line when drawn on the crude maps of the guidebooks, but it cut across some of the toughest country in that half of Alaska. Needless to say, few made it, and most got no farther than the Valdez Glacier. Of some 3,000 men and women who landed at Valdez in 1897–98 and attempted to hack their way across the glacier, only 200 or so managed to reach the Copper River. Historian Pierre Berton estimated that only a dozen or so of these reached their goal of Dawson. It would be interesting to know their reaction when finally confronted by Canadian customs officials.19
But the other thousands were in even more trouble in Valdez. Port Valdez, the fine ice-free estuary off the Gulf of Alaska, was first mapped and named for a Spanish naval officer in 1790 by Don Salvador Fidalgo. But in 1898, the town of Valdez was nothing more than a cluster of tents, the final stop for the coastal steamers whose captains were cashing in on this so-called All-American route. For those who did not escape the place in 1898, the ensuing winter proved long and supplies meager. The scourge of scurvy was rampant. Most ended up being rescued by a U.S. Army detachment in the spring of 1899.
Remember a certain Lieutenant Abercrombie whose look up the Copper River in 1884 had him swearing never to return to this country? In 1898, William R. Abercrombie, now a captain (promotion in the peacetime army came slowly), landed in Valdez with instructions to explore once again routes to the Yukon in light of the Klondike discoveries. He personally made it as far as Mentasta Pass before descending the Copper and returning to Seattle. When he returned to Valdez with another detachment in the spring of 1899, it was with instructions to construct a military road north to Copper Center. But first he had to lend assistance to the starving stampeders. “My God, Captain,” the quartermaster’s agent greeted him, “it has been clear hell! I tell you the early days of Montana were not a marker to what I have gone through this winter!”20
To Abercrombie’s credit, he was far more successful on this Alaskan assignment than he had been years before. After lending assistance, he directed the improvement of a trail out of Valdez, up Keystone Canyon, and over Thompson Pass—roughly the same route the Richardson Highway and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline now follow.
The only thing more ill conceived than the route north from Valdez was the route across the Malaspina Glacier near Yakutat Bay. Obviously, those who tried it had not heard of the exploits of Israel Cook Russell or the duke of the Abruzzi! It was worse than the worst. One party that tried this route was led by Arthur Dietz, who had advertised in the New York Herald for partners to form a mining company. From the scores who answered his ad, Deitz recruited seventeen others, including a doctor, two New York City policemen, a mineralogist, a tinsmith, and five clerks. The group met faithfully in New York each Sunday to plan the trip and bone up on Arctic conditions, no doubt strolling around Central Park for exercise or riding a bicycle down to the Battery. With such training, they were put ashore at Yakutat Bay in March 1898.
The Malaspina Glacier is larger than the state of Rhode Island, perhaps 100 times the size of Manhattan, an endless plain of ice, crevasses, and windswept ridges almost devoid of vegetation and substance. Off they went. For three months they struggled to cross the glacier. Dietz’s brother-in-law, the physician, became the first to perish when his sled and four dogs disappeared into a crevasse. When winter came, who knew where they were? They tried to winter over in a makeshift cabin, but some went crazy and struck out for Dawson in the dead of winter, never to be seen again. Three others were buried in an avalanche. By spring, the gold fever was gone, and the survivors could think of only one thing: escape.
They thought they were on the headwaters of the Tanana, but somehow they found themselves once again confronted by the ugly Malaspina Glacier. The remaining seven recrossed it to Yakutat Bay, but only four of the original eighteen were still alive when the revenue cutter USS Wolcott found them. Dietz was one of them, and he managed to write a book about the ordeal. Most ironic, however, was the reporting of the Seattle Times when they were finally brought ashore there. The paper asserted that the four survivors had returned with half a million dollars in gold dust. Obviously, the quartet had nothing but broken bodies, and two were totally blind from the glare on the glacier. With journalism such as that, however, it was no wonder that the rush was on.21
There were, of course, all-Canadian routes as well. The Canadians and British promoted them under the guise of their own national pride, but in reality they were attempts to avoid the reciprocal American tariffs of Dyea or Skagway. Some of the publicity and brochures generated by Canadian Boards of Trade for these routes were so alluring that many Americans ended up trying them, too. The Ashcroft Trail, sometimes called the Spectre Trail, began at the town of Ashcroft, northeast of Vancouver, and snaked its way through the Fraser River country and the Cariboo Mining District. Then it headed north to Telegraph Creek and eventually Teslin Lake and the headwaters of the Yukon.
Others had come this way before. In places there were faint remnants of the swath cut through the spruce forest in 1865 by the Canadian division of the Western Union Telegraph Expedition. At least 1,500 men, including American novelist Hamlin Garland, and some 3,000 horses tried the Ashcroft Trail during the summer of 1898, but it was a never-ending string of black bogs, rushing rivers, and murderous insects. One fellow hung himself from the crosstree of his tent and left behind a hastily scribbled note: “Bury me here, where I failed.”22 Once again, the enormous scale of the land had been overlooked. Only a handful reached their goal.
The merchants of Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia, also touted the Stikine River Trail. It was advertised as “avoid[ing] the danger and hardships on the passes and the Whitehorse and other rapids.” In reality, though, this route delivered one to roughly the same headwaters of the Yukon as did the White Pass and Chilkoot routes, but added at least 300 miles to the trip. The route led up the Stikine River from Wrangell to Telegraph Creek. Wrangell was still a rowdy outpost, and some of Soapy Smith’s (see next chapter) henchmen had even managed to get a toehold there. In the early spring of 1898, it was possible to drag sleds up the frozen Stikine River as far as Glenora. But there the trail ended, and as the snow melted, the route on to Telegraph Creek became one interminable sea of deep mud. If one was lucky enough to make it to Telegraph Creek, the route north was essentially the northern part of the Ashcroft Trail, equally nonexistent.23
Finally, there were the Edmonton trails, a maze of routes leading north from Edmonton, Alberta, via the complex system of northwest Canada’s rivers. The most amazing version ran north down the Athabasca and Mackenzie Rivers almost to the Arctic Ocean and then back south via the Porcupine or Peel River to the Yukon and finally Dawson. More direct routes, somehow piecing together the Peace, Liard, and Pelly Rivers, were almost trackless excursions across Canada’s vast north. By the time the handful who survived these routes reached Dawson, it was the summer of 1899, two years after word of the initial discoveries reached the outside. The boom was over, and most sailed down the Yukon again for home without so much as an ounce of gold dust in their pokes. The hardships of these routes are wonderfully told in James Michener’s short novel Journey, which was originally written to be part of his epic Alaska.
Thus, for Alaska the story of the Klondike is one of journeys over rugged geography by rugged individuals—men, women, and even children—who braved the heights and endured the hardships to follow the lure of gold. Most came away empty-handed; some did not come away at all. The trails of ’98 resounded with an excitement that captivated a generation and, like a clarion summons, sent its sons and daughters north to Alaska.