Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (46 page)

It was Steele who enforced the order that no man could cross the border without a year’s supply of food. Undoubtedly this helped save the country from the kind of famine that had threatened Dawson the previous fall. At the lakes he instituted another rule: every boat must carry a serial number painted on the bow. Steele’s men went from boat to boat recording the numbers, the names of the occupants, and the addresses of their next of kin. These lists were sent to police posts strung out along the river; if a boat failed to check in at each post within a reasonable time, the Mounties went searching for it. As a result of this foresight an undisciplined armada of more than seven thousand boats was safely convoyed through some five hundred miles of unknown water.

As the boat-builders worked away on the shores of the mountain lakes, Steele’s men moved among them, advising on methods of construction and urging the amateur carpenters to “build strong – don’t start out in a floating coffin.” They settled disputes, helped recalcitrant partners divide their outfits, acted as general administrators and settled the estates of those who died, selling those effects which were not worth shipping home and dispatching the funds to the next of kin. And when real estate speculators tried to seize the land around the lakes and charge the stampeders a fee for its use, the police sent them packing.

They were all gallant young men, these constables with the neat, aquiline profiles and soft accents that hinted at their background. The large majority were Englishmen, younger sons of well-to-do families, seeking adventure and service in the outposts of Empire. They seldom raised their voices, almost never drew a gun, and rarely had to give an order twice. Their chivalry is attested to by the incident of a honeymoon couple crossing the White Pass that spring in search of gold. Their outfits had been taken ahead by pack train, and they were carrying only a small valise with no change of clothing when they suddenly crashed through the melting shore-ice of the lake. A Mountie
NCO
appeared at once and placed his tent and wardrobe at the disposal of the drenched and shivering bride, who rode into Bennett dressed in scarlet jacket and yellow-striped breeches.

By late spring the Mounted Police had collected one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in customs duties and Steele was faced with the problem of transporting this sum through the lawless American territory under the noses of the Soapy Smith gang. Inspector Zachary Taylor Wood, a grandson of a former U.S. president, was chosen for the job. To allay suspicion Steele spread the story that Wood was being transferred back to the prairies and was taking only baggage and boatmen. Actually the policeman’s kit bags were stuffed with gold and bank-notes and were so heavy that it took several men to lug each one. Steele dared not risk sending Wood down the White Pass and through the town of Skagway; instead, he dispatched him on a more circuitous route – over the Chilkoot to Dyea and thence by boat to Skagway, where the steamer
Tartar
was waiting to take him to Victoria.

Halfway across the bay between the two ports, Wood’s boat was attacked by another loaded with thugs who tried to ram him. Wood held them off at gunpoint until he reached the dock. At the wharfside he could see a dapper group of men and at their head a slender figure with a neat black beard. It was Smith himself.

The scene was a tense one. Ringed around the gangway was a group of sailors brandishing loaded rifles, placed on guard by the captain of the
Tartar
, who had steam up and was ready to push off. Only a feet away stood Smith and his men with pistols under their coats. Then, as Wood’s embattled craft touched the dock, Smith broke the tension. He sauntered easily across to Wood, with a smile of greeting.

“Why not hang around and visit Skagway for a while?” he invited.

The policeman gave him a wry smile in return and politely declined. A few minutes later he was safely on his way to Victoria, and Smith returned to easier pickings along the boardwalks of his little kingdom.

3

The outlandish armada

Spring had come, but the ice on the lakes still held. The purple pasqueflower poked its hairy stem above the snow, and the snow melted around it. Water gurgled beneath the mosses, ran in torrents between the rocks, and tumbled in lacy cascades from the peaks above. The sun shone on the glistening hills on the carpets of wild flowers that sprang up: on the little mountain forget-me-nots, the pink snakeweed, the Dutchman’s breeches, and the delicate blue harebells, on the wild bleeding-hearts, the white alpine geranium, the twinflowers, and the mauve shooting-stars. The sparrows were back and so were the robins, and in the sky the geese were honking north. Bears, hungry from their winter’s fast, lumbered along the snowline, and occasionally a bull moose plunged through the thickets. Suddenly the world was warm again and drenched with sunlight and vibrant with colour, from the reds of the rust-stained mountains to the pure greens of the water that showed through the melting ice.

On the rotting surface of the lake a furry layer of slush grew thickly, and as water formed along the bank a hedgerow of boats and scows, four or five deep, encircled the shores of Bennett. On its margin the boat-builders sat, and smoked their pipes, and waited.

On May 29, with a creak and a rumble, the ice began to move in the lower lakes and the great boat-race was on. During that first day eight hundred craft set sail for the Klondike, with every man bending to the oars in an attempt to maintain a lead on those behind. One or two who looked back espied a solitary figure standing on a small hill behind the police post. It was Sam Steele, watching his brood depart, like a mother hen. The policeman’s brow was creased with worry, for he knew that the boatmen had no more experience with river navigation than they had in boat-building.

Within forty-eight hours all the lakes were clear of ice and the whole freakish flotilla of 7,124 boats loaded with thirty million pounds of solid food was in motion. Out onto the mint-green water the ungainly armada lazily drifted. Then as a slender breeze rippled down the mountain passageway and caught the sails, a tremor of excitement could be felt in each man’s heart as it quickened with the speed of his craft. Off they sailed like miniature galleons, seeking the treasure that lay beyond the horizon’s rim, the most bizarre fleet ever to navigate fresh water. Here were twenty-ton scows crammed with oxen, horses, and dogs, one-man rafts made of three logs hastily bound together, light Peterborough canoes packed over the passes on men’s shoulders, and strange oblong vessels that looked like – and sometimes were – floating packing-boxes. Here were slim bateaux brought in sections from the Outside and canoes made from hollow logs with sticks for oarlocks and paddles hand-whittled from tree trunks. Here were skiffs and cockleshells, outriggers and junks, catamarans and kayaks, arks and catboats and wherries. Here were boats with wedge bottoms, and boats with flat bottoms, and boats with curved bottoms; boats shaped like triangles and boats shaped like circles; boats that looked like coffins, and boats that were coffins. Here were enormous rafts with hay and horses aboard, propelled by mighty sweeps; and here were others built from a single log with only a mackinaw coat for a sail. Here was a craft modelled after a Mississippi side-wheeler with two side-wheels operated by hand cranks, twisting and turning awkwardly in a zigzag movement down the lake. And here was a boat with two women who had sewn their undergarments together and suspended them between a pair of oars to make a sail. From each mast fluttered a makeshift flag, usually a bandanna or a towel, and on each bow was daubed the name of a wife, a sweetheart, a home town, a good-luck slogan, or a memory –
Yellow Garter, Seven-Come-Eleven, San Francisco, Golden Horseshoe
.

The setting of this Odyssey was Olympian. The mountains, their tops still frosted, turned to an azure blue in the summer’s haze and were perfectly reflected in the shimmering glacial waters. As the bright sub-Arctic evening fell, the breeze dropped, the sails went limp, and every boat drifted to a stop. The sun was still high in the skies and, softened by the haze, seemed to bathe the water in a golden mist. Now a feeling of strange contentment spread across the argonauts as each man settled back in the stern of his vessel and, often for the first time, contemplated the scene around him. This was a sight that no man had seen before: thousands of boats becalmed on the blue-green waters of a mountain lake. No man would ever see it again. For a moment the race for the gold-fields was lulled as each contestant, thinking back to the toil on the passes and the strain in the sawpits, to the furies that had possessed him on the trail and the despairs that had seized him on the slopes – thinking back to all the wild fancies and snares and sophistries to which he had fallen prey – realized that the worst was behind him at last. Few made any attempt to move on that first night. One or two broke into song and were joined by others until, in the larger boats and scows, quartets could be heard carolling in harmony. The Klondike was still five hundred miles distant, but, as all could see, it was a boat-ride all the way.

But the following morning the race was renewed; the flotilla lost its bunched-up character, and within a few days the entire lake-and-river system from Bennett to Dawson was alive with boats. Soon the passage was marked with those small human dramas that had become a feature of the stampede and which, in retrospect, have the ring of a dime novel about them. On Lake Bennett a sudden squall sprang up and drove a heavily laden scow onto a rock. There were three people aboard: Mrs. Mabel Long of California, her new husband, and a young man named Rossburg whom the couple had picked up the week before. Mrs. Long was eighteen years old and had been married six months earlier, much against her will but on her parents’ insistence, to a man twenty years her senior. As the vessel struck the rock, she was flung into the water while her husband stood panic-stricken in the boat, wringing his hands and calling for help. Rossburg jumped overboard at once, swam to the drowning woman, and dragged her onto a sand-bar. When the scow drifted over, Mrs. Long announced that she was leaving her spouse forever. In the confusion she and Rossburg escaped and fled downstream with the estranged husband in hot but vain pursuit. Eventually she obtained a divorce and married her young rescuer, who, in the best tradition of nineteenth-century fiction, turned out to be the heir to a Boston fortune.

4

Split-Up City

On leaving the mountain lakes, each boat had to run the gantlet of Miles Canyon and the rapids beyond it before the river proper could be reached. All had heard of this canyon, but few knew exactly where it was until, at a turn in the river, they saw a piece of red calico and then a board upon whose rough surface the single word “
CANNON”
had been scrawled. Suddenly, dinning into their ears, came the roar of tumbling waters beyond.

And there before them lay the gorge, a narrow cleft in a wall of black basalt with an unholy whirlpool at its centre. Beyond this dark fissure lurked two sets of rapids: the Squaw Rapids, where the river raced over a series of jutting rocks; and the White Horse Rapids, so called because the foam upon them resembled white steeds leaping and dancing in the sunlight.

As the river descended into the canyon it narrowed to one third of its size, so that the water was forced to a crest four feet high. From this funnel of foam, small geysers erupted, and the boats sweeping between the rock walls were forced to teeter precariously upon it, as on a tightrope, while the helmsmen tried to veer around the obstacles that blocked the way – the huge intertwining drifts of timber, the jagged reefs of boulders and sand-bars, the twisted roots of trees, and the sharp little rock teeth that tore the bottoms from the scows and barges.

Schwatka, the military explorer of the Yukon, who had passed this way fifteen years before, called it “a diminutive Fingal’s Cave … resembling a deep black thoroughfare paved with the whitest of marble.” The walls rose a sheer hundred feet from the foaming crest, and the whirlpool in the centre was so swift and fierce that in the spring of 1895 two Swedes, carried into the canyon by accident, were spun for six hours in a dizzying circle before escaping from the trap. But this was by no means the end of the hazard, for, after broadening out to form the whirlpool, the canyon narrowed again to a mere thirty feet, so that the water spurted from it into the Squaw Rapids as though it were gushing from a hydrant.

Into the gloomy gorge the first stampeders plunged, almost without stopping, for they were at the head of the fleet and eager to maintain their positions. Most had never handled a boat before, but this did not deter them. Indeed, one lonely and melancholy Englishman made the entire five-mile journey without realizing he was in danger. But others, in spite of their bravado, were less fortunate and shared the fate of the Norwegian who went through aboard a great bateau, calmly playing on a music box, only to be swamped by a wave. In the first few days one hundred and fifty boats like his were wrecked and five men drowned, so that those behind hesitated to chance the surly waters and hung back until several thousand craft were crowded together at the bottleneck of the canyon in a bewildering traffic jam. At this point Sam Steele appeared upon the scene.