Journey (7 page)

—

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, drawknife, 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.”