Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (9 page)

Circle City accepted culture. Up from the University of Chicago came Miss Anna Fulcomer to open a government school. The miners established a library which contained the complete works of Huxley, Darwin, Carlyle, Macaulay, Ruskin, and Irving. It filed the standard illustrated papers and supplied its members with chess sets, a morocco-bound quarto Bible, an
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, and an
International Dictionary
.

Circle City had its greatest year in 1896. The gold-production that season had exceeded one million dollars, and lots were selling for two thousand dollars apiece. Who would have believed that before the winter was out the Paris of Alaska would be a ghost town, the saloons closed and barred, the caches empty and left to rot, the doors of the worthless cabins hanging open to the winds, and scarcely a dog left to howl in the silent streets?

But, as the winter of ’96-’97 wore on, strange rumours began to filter down from the upper-river country about an almost unbelievable event on a little stream whose name nobody could properly pronounce. At Christmastime these rumours were confirmed, and Circle City was never the same again. The first act in the drama of the Klondike was already under way.

Chapter Two

1
The prospector and the squaw man

2
The exculpation of Lying George

3
Moose pastures

4
The kings of Eldorado

5
Henderson’s luck

1

The prospector and the squaw man

The man in the poling-boat slipped silently down the river, moving swiftly with the stiff current of the grey Yukon, keeping close to the shoreline, where martins darted from the high clay banks and the willows arched low into the water. Beneath him the waters hissed and boiled, as if stirred by some inner fire. Above him thrush and yellow warbler fluttered and carolled. And all around him the blue hills rolled on towards the rim of the world to melt into the haze of the horizon. Between each twin line of hills was a valley, and in the bottom of each valley a little creek gurgled its way down to the river. Below the wet mosses of some of those creeks, the man in the poling-boat knew, there was gold. But in this summer of 1894 he had no more stomach for it. For twenty-three years he had been climbing the hills of the world and trudging down the valleys, picking away at quartz and panning the black sand of a thousand creekbeds. Always the gold had eluded him.

He was a lighthouse-keeper’s son from Big Island off the tattered coast of Nova Scotia, and he could scarcely remember the time when he had not thought of gold. As a child he had read Alaskan histories and wandered about Nova Scotia searching for gold but finding only white iron. “Well,” he would console himself, “It’s a
kind
of gold.” As a youth of fourteen he made the deliberate decision to spend his life seeking it. He believed that the southern hemisphere held out the best hope, and so he signed aboard a sailing-ship to search the seven seas, panning and picking to no avail in New Zealand and Australia and other corners of the globe. After five years he tried the northern hemisphere, working his way up through the Rocky Mountain states to the mines of Colorado, and then, after fourteen years, he was borne north with the human tide flowing towards Alaska. It was characteristic of his nature that, while other men rushed to familiar ground on the Fortymile or on Birch Creek, he had chosen to press his search in unknown country on the upper reaches of the Pelly. But he found no gold on the Pelly; and now, out of funds and out of grub, with two equally disconsolate companions he was drifting.

His name was Robert Henderson. He was tall and lean, with a gaunt hawk’s face, fiercely knit brows, and piercing eyes. His full moustache, drooping slightly at the edges, accentuated the dour look that betrayed his Scottish ancestry. He wore his broad-brimmed miner’s hat proudly, as if it were a kind of badge. All his life he wore it, on city streets and wilderness pathways; it proclaimed to the world that Robbie Henderson was a prospector.

Henderson and his companions had drifted for about one hundred miles when they reached the mouth of the Sixtymile River, whose tributaries curled back towards the headwaters of the Fortymile. Here, on an island, they espied a pinprick of civilization – a few cabins and tents, a sawmill and a big two-storey trading post of square-cut logs operated by the white-bearded Papa Harper and his partner, Joseph Ladue. This little community had been named Ogilvie after William Ogilvie, the Canadian who surveyed the boundary between Alaska and the British Northwest Territories.

Harper was away, but Ladue – a swarthy, stocky figure of French Huguenot background, and a veteran of the river since 1882 – was on the bank to greet Henderson. From delta to headwaters, for two thousand miles, he was known to Indian and white man alike simply as “Joe.”

He too had been obsessed with the idea of gold for most of his life. It had a very real meaning for him, because without it he could not marry his sweetheart, Anna Mason, whose wealthy parents continued to spurn him as a penniless drifter. She was waiting faithfully for him three thousand miles away while he sought his fortune here in a starkly furnished log post on the banks of the Yukon.

For twenty years Ladue had pressed the search, ever since heading west from his foster-parents’ home in Plattsburgh, New York. In the Black Hills country he took a job operating a steam engine in a mine. He knew nothing about engines, but he could learn, and within eighteen months he was a foreman. He knew nothing about mining either, but he could study at night, and within a few more months he was superintendent. But Ladue did not want to mine other men’s gold, and he was off with the herd at the whisper of a new strike – from Wyoming to New Mexico, from New Mexico to Arizona, from Arizona to Alaska. He was one of the first to scale the Chilkoot, and in the next half-dozen years he dipped his pan into scores of gravelly creeks from the Stewart to Nuklayaket, including one gurgling stream whose name would later become world-renowned as “Bonanza.” But for Ladue there was no bonanza. When prospecting failed, he tried farming. When the frost ruined his cabbages and his barley, he set up as a trader. When trading was slow, he built a sawmill and sold sluicebox lumber. He did not daunt easily, for he was a confirmed optimist, wiry, keen-eyed, and cheerful to the point of enthusiasm.

Now he expended some of this enthusiasm on the dour, dogged Henderson and his two companions. It pleased Ladue to see prospectors arriving, for, with his promoter’s mind, he foresaw that sooner or later one would find what all were seeking, and then each would be rich. If there had been a chamber of commerce in the Yukon, Ladue would have been president, for he was a born booster. The slightest trace of a colour in a pan prompted him to talk in glowing terms of a new Eldorado. He was the first in a long line of northern outfitters who realized that a gold strike often brought more fortune to merchant than to miner – but he was by no means the last. Within a few years there would be a thousand Ladues exploiting the wealth of the Yukon Valley.

Ladue’s post lay roughly one hundred miles upstream from Fortymile. Between the two settlements, two other rivers flowed into the Yukon from the opposite side: the Indian River, about thirty miles downstream from Ladue, and then the Thron-diuck River, another thirty miles farther down. Ladue had explored the Thron-diuck in the old days, and had gone so far as to make out an affidavit swearing that there was no gold on its streams. In spite of this, he now professed to believe that the neighbouring Indian River country was ankle-deep in nuggets, and had been extolling its possibilities to every prospector who stopped at his post. Indeed, he had so annoyed the prospectors at Fortymile with his stories of the Indian River that they had all but driven him from camp. As it turned out, Ladue was right about the Indian (and wrong about the Thron-diuck), but he would have been astonished to hear it.

The ragged men, in their thick gum boots and fraying mackinaws, were welcomed into the trader’s spartan quarters, whose grimy walls were ornamented with yellowing woodcuts torn from old newspapers. They sat down at a rickety table, and over beans and tea Ladue talked of the Indian River.

Henderson was ready to try anything.

“Let me prospect for you,” he said. “If it’s good for me, it’s good for you. I’m a determined man. I won’t starve.”

His two companions were less enthusiastic. They chose to quit the north and return to Colorado. But Henderson stayed on, lured by Ladue’s promise of a grubstake, and for the next two years he stubbornly combed the Indian and its tributaries for gold. He searched with that same inquisitive restlessness that had governed his life, shifting from hill to creekbed to island but never settling for long at any given spot. He found gold, but never enough to satisfy him. On the surface bars of the main river he found gold as fine as sifted flour. On Australia Creek he found gold as delicate as lace. He dragged his sled up Quartz Creek, and here he found gold as coarse as sand. It still was not what he was seeking. It is possible, indeed, that had he found a cache of twenty-dollar goldpieces or a mountain of solid gold, he would have felt a vague chagrin, for with Henderson it was the search itself that counted.

Ill-fortune and misadventure served only to stiffen his resolve. He suffered the agonies of leg cramps from constant immersion in the chilling streams, and of snow-blindness from the ceaseless glare on the white slopes. On Australia Creek he endured a harrowing experience when, falling across the broken branch of a tree, he was impaled through the calf and suspended over the rushing torrent like a slab of beef on a butcher’s hook. For fourteen days he lay crippled in his bivouac; then he was away again, living off the land, eating caribou or ptarmigan, limping through the forests or travelling the shallow streams in a crude boat made from the skins of animals.

Occasionally he would raise his eyes northward to examine a curious rounded mountain whose summit rose above the other hills. The creeks of Indian River flowed down the flanks of this dome, and Henderson guessed that on the other side more nameless creeks flowed into another river – probably the Thron-diuck or “Klondike,” as the miners mispronounced it. At last his prospector’s curiosity got the better of him. He climbed the dome to see what was on the other side.

When he reached the summit a sight of breath-taking majesty met his gaze. To the north a long line of glistening snow-capped peaks marched off like soldiers to vanish beyond the lip of the horizon. In every other direction the violet hills rolled on as far as the eye could see, hill upon hill, valley upon valley, gulch upon gulch – and each hill of almost identical height with its neighbour, so that the whole effect through half-closed eyes was of a great plateau creased and gouged and furrowed by centuries of running water.

From the summit on which Henderson was standing, the creeks radiated out like the spokes of a wheel, with himself at the hub. three falling off towards the Indian River and three more, on the far side, running to some unknown stream. He could not know it, but these were six of the richest gold-bearing creeks in the world. They wound through beds of black muck and thick moss, bordered by rank grasses from which the occasional moose lifted its dripping snout; they twisted in sinuous curves across flat valley floors whose flanks, notched by steep gulches, rose in tiers marking the concourse of once mighty tributaries.

Almost at Henderson’s feet a deep cleft dropped off, gorge-like, from the dome. He walked down a little way and dipped his pan into a small creek. When the gravel and sand washed away, there was about eight cents’ worth of gold left behind. Eight cents to the pan! This was a good prospect; he felt that he had found what he was looking for. Back he went over the divide to the Indian River, where about twenty men, lured by Ladue’s tales, were toiling away on the sand-bars. He persuaded three to return with him to the creek which he named “Gold Bottom” because, as he said wistfully, “I had a daydream that when I got my shaft down to bed-rock it might be like the streets of the New Jerusalem.”

By midsummer of 1896 the four men had taken out seven hundred and fifty dollars, and it was time for Henderson to head back to Ladue’s post for more supplies. To each man he met he told the story of a V-shaped valley back in the hills; for this free interchange of information was part of the prospector’s code, to which Henderson fiercely subscribed. He not only told strangers of the gold, but he also urged them to turn back in their tracks and stake claims. In this way he emptied the settlement at the mouth of the Sixtymile. Every man except Ladue headed downstream.

His order filled, Henderson drifted back the way he had come in his skin boat. It was late summer, and the water was low. The Indian River was so shallow that Henderson, fearing he might tear his craft to shreds trying to navigate it, determined to continue on down the Yukon towards the Thron-diuck, guessing correctly that Gold Bottom Creek must flow into it. Thus, on a fateful summer’s day he approached his meeting with George Washington Carmack, the squaw man. The memory of that moment, bitter as gall, was to haunt Henderson all the days of his life.