Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (44 page)

The harsh story of the trials of an English couple named Rowley who attacked the Chilkoot that winter illustrates the intensity of the common desire to reach the Klondike.

The Rowleys’ first misfortune occurred when the S.S.
Corona
, on which they were Dyea-bound, was shipwrecked. The couple lost their entire outfit, but, rather than turn back, they attempted to earn enough to keep going by freighting goods across the pass. The effort was too much for Rowley, who took sick at Sheep Camp, but this only caused Mrs. Rowley to redouble her efforts as a packer. She managed to move thirteen hundred pounds of goods as far as the Scales, often working twenty hours at a stretch and seldom leaving the trail before two in the morning. The strain was too great, and before her husband was fully recovered, she herself was worn out from fatigue. Rowley resolved to send her back to San Francisco. Her brother wrote that he had sent her one hundred dollars to the Dyea post office, but she did not receive the money. This was too much to endure. Distraught and enraged at the supposed theft, Mrs. Rowley bought a gun and tried to shoot the postmaster. She was shipped to Sitka, the Alaskan capital, on a charge of attempted murder. En route she leaped from the steamer, but her husband pulled her from the water, and she was shortly released from jail on grounds of insanity. While all this was going on, the Rowleys’ entire second outfit, purchased with money earned from freighting, was stolen at Lake Lindemann. Did this deter them? Not in the least. As the Reverend J. A. Sinclair of Skagway wrote to his wife: “You can imagine the intensity with which the gold fever possesses these men when I tell you that Rowley still intends to go on to Dawson.”

4

Death beneath the snows

The greatest crime on the Dyea Trail that winter, as on all the trails, was not murder but theft. On the American side of the border any man caught stealing from his fellows faced the swift verdict of a miners’ meeting.

The most macabre of these summary trials was held within a tent saloon at Sheep Camp on February 15, 1898. Here, in the capricious flicker of smoking oil lamps and candles, three men, Wellington, Dean, and Hansen by name, went on trial for their lives, accused of theft. The circumstances of their apprehension were as freakish as the environment of their inquisition. Their capture had been effected through an odd quirk of the weather: a thin coating of ice on the side of their stolen sled had acted like a varnish on a painting to reveal the half-obliterated name of the rightful owner.

Into the tent, with its leaping shadows – the scene was worthy of a Goya – each prisoner was conducted separately. The first, Dean, was swiftly freed, since it was obvious that he had but recently joined the other two. But Wellington’s and Hansen’s stories conflicted so seriously that both were found guilty. The verdict was scarcely rendered when Wellington broke from his captors, whipped out a hidden pistol, tore a hole in the tent wall with a knife end, and, firing over his shoulder at the pursuing pack, flew off down the trail. It was a futile gesture. As the leading man reached him, Wellington turned the gun on himself, blowing most of his face off and falling into the arms of Wilson Mizner’s brother Addison, an architect who was to become the most flamboyant figure in the Florida real estate boom of the 1920’s. The two men plowed into a near-by tent, one dead, the other drenched with blood.

Three Mizner brothers were all witnesses to this incident. Edgar, the Alaska Commercial Company’s manager at St. Michael (who was known as the Pope of Alaska because of his arrogant manner), had persuaded Wilson, Addison, and a third brother, William, to join him in Dawson. It was the start of two eccentric careers which have been chronicled several times in the folk-history of the continent.

The meeting, on reconvening, sentenced Hansen to fifty lashes rather than death, and a small wiry man with dark beady eyes volunteered to carry out the punishment. Outside the blood-spattered tent, a great circle was formed as the thief, stripped to the waist, was tied to a post; men climbed up on cabin roofs to take photographs, while one woman squeezed into the front row and asked the prisoner to look at her as she snapped him with her Kodak. Then a hush fell over the buzzing crowd as the man with the whip stepped up.

“I do not do this because I like it,” he announced, “but because I like honesty and feel that it must be preserved in this community to save lives.”

His actions belied his protestations, for he seized the knotted thong and swung it with his full weight across the miscreant’s naked back so that two purple stripes, showing every twist of the rope, followed each blow. The miserable Hansen writhed and leaped in the air as the whip descended, but this only seemed to increase the passion of the executioner, who shrieked and howled crazily as the vigour of his blows increased. By this time the crowd, too, was caught up in a frenzy, some shouting “More!” while others cried “Enough!” until the Mizners moved forward at the fifteenth stroke and freed the prisoner. Apparently unconcerned about his ordeal, Hansen consumed a monstrous meal and was then marched down the trail, smoking his pipe and wearing a large placard on which had been scrawled the word
THIEF
.

Wellington was buried at once, and an itinerant minister preached a solemn two-minute sermon ending with the words: “He that maketh haste to be rich shall not be unpunished.” It was not a particularly propitious text, as Addison Mizner was quick to discern. “I thought this odd,” he wrote dryly, “as everybody on the trail, including myself, was on a gold rush.”

The remarkable thing about this affair was that it was the exception rather than the rule. There were hardships on the trail, certainly, but comparatively few deaths and, considering the circumstances, little major crime. Soapy Smith’s men did take some money from the stampeders; there were a few suicides and some murders on the American side; there were a few score deaths from meningitis, influenza, and pneumonia; a large number of men turned back rather than face the final moments of the climb; but a great multitude, leaderless and unorganized, passed over the summit of the divide like an army on the march.

It is equally remarkable that only two natural disasters marred the course of the winter’s progress across the Chilkoot, although both were spectacular in the extreme.

The first occurred in September, 1897. For years, travellers had been fascinated by a prodigious glacier that hung like a brooding monster over the pass. Harry de Windt, a British explorer who crossed the Chilkoot in the mid-nineties, saw it suspended insecurely between two granite peaks, looking “as though a child’s touch would send it crashing into the valley below.” The face was three hundred feet high, “indescribably beautiful” because of the shifting light effects – turquoise and sapphire on dull days, dazzling diamond-white in the sunlight, delicate mauve, pink, and green in the twilight hours. From this scintillating mass there issued occasional reports like the distant rumble of cannon, sometimes faint, and sometimes so deafening that the watchers below expected the entire ice sheet to tumble into the valley below. In the end, that is what happened.

During the summer the warm weather and heavy rains had caused a lake to form within the heart of the glacier. Then the autumn winds, whistling through the mountains, tore half an acre of ice from the edge of the mass. With a noise like a thousand cannon, a wall of water descended upon the pass. The reverberations woke the twenty-five campers who had pitched their tents on the dry ground of an old gorge, and these raced for the hills as a wave twenty feet high tore down upon them. The roaring waters picked up the Stone House as if it were a pebble and moved it a quarter of a mile down the valley, smashing to pieces about forty tents and outfits, including the entire gambling casino and liquor supply of Arizona Charlie Meadows. But there were only three deaths.

The second tragedy on the Chilkoot occurred on April 3, 1898, and it was far crueller. For two months an intermittent storm had been raging, making travel impossible on most days. For the previous two weeks the snow had fallen without respite. On Saturday, April 2, the blizzard increased in intensity, and six feet of wet snow was deposited, so that the peaks and glaciers were topheavy with it. The pass was now at its most treacherous, and those few who dared to climb it did so only in the cool of the evening. The Indians and experienced packers refused to go up at all.

In spite of their warnings, large numbers who had been fidgeting for weeks unable to scale the mountains, took advantage of a lull in the storm to make for the summit. The first hint of impending tragedy came early on Sunday. A bent old man, groaning and waving his arms, hammered on the door of a restaurant owned by two partners, Joppe and Mueller, at the Scales, woke them from their Sabbath rest, and cried out that several people had been buried alive by a snow-slide up the trail. The two men roused a dozen others, and these dug frantically through ten feet of snow and succeeded in rescuing all but three. Now every person was thoroughly alarmed, and a headlong race began for Sheep Camp, two miles below.

Higher still in the mountains, the guttural rumble of avalanches could be heard. A group of tramway workers had made their way in at mid-morning to report that enormous mounds of snow, piled high along the peaks, were starting to slip down the smooth glaciers. This lent wings to the retreat. Downward the fleeing men and women scrambled, staying close together in single file while clinging to a rope that had been strung along the way. They did not follow the main trail which led down “Long Hill” from the Scales to the Stone House, but went by way of a natural ravine which had long been considered treacherous by knowledgeable guides.

At noon it happened. One of the survivors, a man from Maine named J. A. Rines, described his own feelings: “All of a sudden I heard a loud report and instantly began to feel myself moving swiftly down the hill and, looking round, saw many others suddenly fall down, some with their feet in the air, their heads buried out of sight in the snow.” Rines braced himself as best he could, kept to his feet, and let himself be carried along. He was caught by the snow and buried instantly thirty feet deep.

Others had similar experiences. Some grasped the rope that was used to haul freight to the summit. Some, feeling themselves buried hip-deep by the weight of loose snow which struck them first, struggled with it only to be smothered by the main force of the avalanche which followed. Mueller, the café-owner from the Scales, felt himself held as fast as if he were in a cast.

The avalanche had tumbled from a peak twenty-five hundred feet above the trail, just above the Stone House. It covered ten acres to a depth of thirty feet. Within twenty minutes a thousand men from Sheep Camp were on the spot digging parallel trenches in an effort to locate the victims. The scene was a weird and terrible one. Small air holes sometimes appeared in the snow to mark the spot where a man or woman had been buried, and somewhere beneath them the searchers could hear the muffled cries of the victims. Those who still lived beneath the snow (and only a few had been killed by the slide) could hear one another talking, and conversations were carried on between them. Relatives above called out their last good-byes to those entombed below. One old man could be heard alternately praying and cursing until his voice was stilled. But even the strongest could not move a muscle, for the snow was packed around them as tightly as cement.

As the hours wore on, those who were not rescued at once slowly became anesthetized by the carbon dioxide given off by their own breathing; they began to feel drowsy, and drifted off into a dreamless sleep from which few awoke. Their corpes were lifted out in the days that followed, many of them still in a running position, as if forever fleeing from the onrushing avalanche.

More than sixty perished. A handful were rescued alive, some of whom had been three hours under the snow. Four of them died later, but others, including Mueller and his partner, Joppe, made extraordinary recoveries. Joppe’s was Lazarus-like in its drama. When he was lifted from his frozen tomb, apparently dead, his sweetheart, Vernie Woodward, was beside herself. She was a resilient young woman who had been packing on the pass since the previous summer, first carrying freight on her back like a man and later working with horses. Now all her surface masculinity was shucked off as she flung herself hysterically upon Joppe’s limp figure, begging him to return to her, manipulating his arms and legs, rubbing his back, breathing warm air into his lungs, and crying and praying by turns. For three hours she continued in this manner while those around tried to drag her away. Then, to the stupefaction of all, Joppe suddenly opened his eyes and spoke her name, and it was as if a dead man had miraculously come alive again.

There were other strange rescues: a woman hauled from the snow where she had been buried head-down, hysterical but living; and Marc Hanna, the ox, found after two days contentedly chewing his cud in the natural stable of a snow cave, which he had tramped out himself when the avalanche buried him. But for days after the tragedy, sled after sled loaded with corpses moved down the trail to the mass morgue. Here Soapy Smith’s predators were awaiting them. Smith, indeed, had himself appointed coroner. Near the site of the tragedy he set up a tent to which the corpses were brought for identification, and here each frozen cadaver was expertly stripped of rings, jewellery, cash, and other valuables.

The businessmen of Skagway, locked in a mercantile war with Dyea, lost no time in pointing to the disaster as a solemn warning to anybody using the rival town as a port of entry into the Yukon. This drove the
Trail
, one of Dyea’s two papers, to a bitter tirade:

“The Skagwayans have no shame. Their ambition seems to be to heap misery upon others. They glory in publishing false statements; they are ghoulish enough to wish there had been five thousand if it only happened on the Chilkoot trail.… They show no respect for the dead; but apparently take hellish delight in magnifying the awful fiction and in the hour of death take advantage of the sad calamity by advertising their fever-stricken hole of Hell.”