NORTH ON THE GUARDIAN

One hundred thousand stampeders set out for the Klondike goldfields that year, and it seemed to me that they were all crowded on the decks of the Guardian.

The Guardian was on her way to the boneyard when the stampede began. She was turned around, lined up in the docks with other unseaworthy vessels, and called a steamship.

I did not complain. I was lucky to be on board.

Wandering around the waterfront, I had happened to see a man doubled over, obviously in great pain. His partner was guiding him toward a hack and, at the same time, was auctioning his steamship ticket.

I pushed in close and shouted, “Two hundred cash.”

“Sold!” The partner handed me a green ticket:

1ST CLASS FARE—SAN FRANCISCO TO SKAGWAY, ALASKA—$100.

I clutched the ticket in my hand and hurried to the steamer. “Thanks, Pa,” I whispered. “It was from your savings.”

The Guardian had accommodations for one hundred passengers. But there were on her decks five hundred men, along with horses, mules, dogs, and sheep. In my cabin were twelve men and three berths. All the cabins were oversold.

The purser screamed that anyone who did not like it could get off at the first coal stop—or immediately, and two more men would take his place.

“Throw them all overboard,” a voice bellowed from the pilothouse.

“Who’s the big mouth up there?” a burly man asked, rolling up his sleeves.

“It’s the ship’s captain,” the purser yelled, pushing him back.

The crowd was stunned into silence. Then someone shouted, “How’s the captain steering this wreck if he’s drunk already?”

The purser did not answer.

I pushed through the crowd to the foredeck, where the horses were quartered in crude stalls. Bales of hay were piled up to the pilothouse windows. I supposed that looking down into a horse corral was reason enough for the captain to drink.

After one sleepless night in the crowded cabin, our group organized. The biggest man, a policeman from Colorado, wrote out a time schedule with bylaws and nailed it to the cabin door.

Each of us would have a berth in the cabin for six hours a day. Only personal bags were to be left in the cabin—grubstakes and dogs were to be left in the hall or up on deck. Our schedule would rotate every four days. There were to be no complaints.

The policeman drew names from a derby hat for cabinmates. I ended up with Snorin’ Sam and Mr. Con Man. The con man may have snored also, but I never found that out. He spent all his time in the cabin going through the bags.

He was as smooth as his black oiled hair. During our first shift he confessed that he was afraid to sleep in the top bunk because of his fear of heights. Once as a child he had fallen from the roof of his house, he said.

It didn’t matter to me. I slept in the top bunk in my clothes with my money stashed in the bottom of my stockings and the gold nugget deep in my pocket. Using my knapsack as a pillow, I lay on my stomach with one arm over my eyes.

Mr. Con Man had the bottom bunk. He was always quiet until Sam in the middle bunk began snoring. Then he would call up to me.

“Sleeps like a log, don’t he?”

I never answered.

“You a light sleeper, kid?”

In a few minutes he would stand up and look at me with his dark beady eyes.

“Asleep, kid?” he would ask. Then he would go through the bags.

I thought of saying something to the policeman, but I kept quiet. I was trying out some of Pa’s advice. “James Erickson, son,” he had said, “be like the Sphinx. Look wise, but don’t say too much.”

The schedule worked fine for temporary. And we all knew it would be just a few weeks until we were rich. Then never again would we be required to adjust to life’s inconveniences.

Each day after our allotted time in the cabin, we hurried upstairs and stood in two lines, one for the dining room and one for the water closets. The men were always in a rush, which seemed a little strange because there were not many places to rush to—just those two. But they rushed from line to line, just the same.

The thing I did not like about the schedule was that it placed me in Mr. Con Man’s company so much. I kept our conversations short.

“You don’t seem to have a grubstake, son,” he said, sidling up to me in the dining room line.

“Not yet.” I concentrated on the beef carcasses hanging in a line next to us. I counted the ribs.

“Don’t seem to have a partner, either, son.”

“Not yet. And the name’s Erickson.”

“Just call me Dad,” he said smoothly.

When not in lines, the men sprawled on top of their grubstakes, playing solitaire. Hating each other. Scheming how to get off the ship faster and how to pick up gold faster than everyone else.

After the first week, they became so bored that they began talking and playing cards together, and soon several partnerships were formed. I hoped that someone would get bored enough to want to hitch up with a kid. But no one did.

Mostly I sat on the hay bales, talking to the horses and wishing I could find Rexy on that ship. Sometimes from the hay bales I talked to Captain Hillis, who liked conversation as much as the bottle.

We sailed north up the coastlines of California, Oregon, and Washington, our small steamer rocking in the rough waters. When we reached Vancouver Island, we sailed around its southern tip to Victoria and from there entered the sheltered waters of the Inside Passage.

“There’s an island portside,” I told Captain Hillis one day when the fog was heavy. We were somewhere in the Inside Passage, surrounded by tall pine trees and low clouds.

“Tarnation! Didn’t see it,” he exclaimed. He blew the ship’s whistle as if to tell the island to move over. Later he told me that he blew the whistle to judge by its echo how close the ship was to the shore.

But wherever I was on that ship, Mr. Con Man was never far away.

“You say you’re meeting your partner in Skagway, son?”

“That’s the plan.”

“You intending to buy your supplies when you get there?”

“That’s the plan.”

One day there was a little excitement that broke the routine. I was on the foredeck talking to the horses when a gang of red-faced men roared up to the pilothouse, threatening to kill the captain.

“Our berths,” they snarled, “are right below here.” They pointed to the horse stalls. “Just below the horses, to be exact.”

“So?” Captain Hillis sneered.

“So there are cracks in the deck,” one man yelled. “Wide cracks. And what the horses do, drips through on us.” He paused for emphasis. “And it ain’t rain!”

Captain Hillis looked shocked. He moved toward the door, nodding and smiling, waving the men out ahead of him. As the men moved back from the door, he quickly slammed it shut and locked it.

“Go tell the horses,” he yelled through a window.

I laughed on the foredeck until my sides hurt. I could laugh, of course, because my cabin was in the stern.

The scenery was beautiful. Two thousand miles of lush evergreeen forests, deep blue fjords, snowcapped mountains, lacy waterfalls, and silver glaciers drifting silently out to sea.

It was hardly noticed at all, except for a few icebergs that nearly hit us off Prince Rupert. And the totem poles near Ketchikan almost scared the wits out of us. When those tall painted faces with beaks and wings loomed through the fog, I saw men shudder with fright.

But all that scenery might just as well have been painted on a picture postcard for all the stampeders cared. They complained when the ship made coal stops, saying the captain was trying to delay them. That’s how bad they had the gold fever.

Except for the excitement over the horses, and the scare of the icebergs and totem poles, those two weeks dragged by much the same until the dancehall girls got on at Juneau, toward the end of our journey.

When the steamer pulled up to the towering mountain of Juneau, the men yelled, “If one more person gets on this old tub, we’ll sink for sure!”

But when they saw the four young ladies stepping up the gangplank, they began cheering. That pleased the ladies, and they lifted their long skirts and kicked a cancan right there on the gangplank. Hidden under those long skirts were colored ruffles and black lace stockings with silver-spangled garters.

A skinny boy also came aboard, although he was hardly noticed because of the dancing girls. When he was standing alone, I asked if he would like to go see the horses. He must have been seasick, because he turned and fled.

The following day, as Captain Hillis piloted the steamer up the narrowing Lynn Canal, he said to me, “Do you know about Skagway, James?”

All I knew about Skagway was that it was the outfitting place at the foot of the Coast Mountains that we had to cross to reach the Klondike goldfields.

“It’s the windiest place on earth,” the captain said. “Windy. Cold. Ugly. All the buildings are covered with black tar paper, flapping day and night, to keep out the north wind.”

He pulled a face as if he were seasick.

“Winds don’t bother me,” I said. I was anxious to get there.

“There’s something in Skagway far worse than the wind,” the captain said.

“Oh?” I waited impatiently.

Captain Hillis did not say more. He just shook his head.

At Skagway, the Guardian was met by a parade of cowboys, who rode their horses down the long wooden wharf, whooping and hollering. A minister pranced his dapple-gray horse right up the gangplank and shouted, “Welcome to Skagway!”

I ducked past the welcoming committee and hurried down the long wharf built out over the tidal flats, where steamers and scows had dropped their freight and animals.

Dogs were barking. Horses were rearing and snorting. Men were cussing and dragging their goods through the mud, trying to beat the tide to the high-water line. It was a mad scene.

Up above, the scenery was another picture postcard—mountains, covered in dark cottonwood and spruce trees, rising thousands of feet above the beach, their lonely peaks somewhere up there above the clouds. Green mountains, glacial green waterfalls—

But no one was looking up. And I didn’t either, for long.

I moved with the crowd, around tents and campfires to the main street of town, called Broadway. The loudest music I had ever heard came surging from that makeshift tar-paper street. Loud enough to wake the dead, Pa would say.

On the boardwalk a gypsy organ-grinder was cranking out a tune and singing:

When you hear dem-a bells go ding ling ling,
All join ’round, and sweetly you must sing,
And when the verse am through,
In the chorus all join in,
There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!

His little monkey jumped up onto his shoulder to avoid being trampled and held out a tin cup hopefully.

Suddenly a bullet whizzed overhead. It pierced the cup and the wall behind. The frightened monkey dropped the cup and covered his eyes.

The crowd laughed hideously, then sang along with the organ-grinder:

And when the verse am through,
In the chorus all join in,
There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!

I could tell Skagway was a good place to get out of. And I’d be getting out—as soon as I looked around.