Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 (70 page)

A Note on the Revised Edition

When
Klondike
was completed in 1957, it did not immediately occur to me that the story of the gold rush was part of a larger saga. I intended to follow this book with another about the building of the CPR, for it seemed to me that the two stories had certain things in common: they were both sweeping tales of adventure involving the movements of large numbers of people through time and space. It was only after I had done considerable research into the railway odyssey that I began to glimpse the full dimensions of the over-all epic of the opening up of the North West. Between Confederation and World War 1, an empty subcontinent, stretching from the Great Lakes to the Alaska border, was transformed into a populous domain, carved into sophisticated political units, intersected by road, rail, and wire, surveyed, mapped, settled, fenced, cultivated, and mined. Thus was created the Canada we know today – a transcontinental nation that was only dimly glimpsed by a handful of the men who sat down together in Charlottetown in 1864.

Klondike
, then, forms a chapter in that story. The decision to reset the type and make the book uniform with those that cover the earlier chapters has allowed me to revise and expand the original edition. More than ten thousand words have been added to the main body of the text, based on material not available when the book was published in 1958. These occur in the form of inserts and revisions, more than fifty of them scattered throughout the text and ranging from a single sentence or paragraph to more than a dozen pages.

The new edition contains, for example, expanded sections on the early days of Dyea and Skagway and much new material on the Ashcroft Trail; there is more on the character and reign of Soapy Smith and his gang; I have also been able to flesh out my brief references to E. A. Hegg, the leading photographer of the stampede, and have introduced one or two new figures, such as Norman Lee, the Chilcoten rancher, whose diary was made public after
Klondike
was published, and Stroller White, the itinerant newspaperman, whose newspaper memoirs were recently anthologized. Here and there throughout the book, I have been able to add anecdotes which seem to me to further illuminate the period. There has also been one major revision: the two sections on the Edmonton trails have been completely overhauled and expanded, thanks in large part to the meticulous researches of J. G. MacGregor, whose book,
The Klondike Rush through Edmonton
, published in 1970, corrected or revised many conclusions (my own among them) that had previously been held concerning the back-door route to the Klondike.

The three maps in the original edition have been replaced by more detailed charts, prepared by Henry Mindak and placed at appropriate points in the text for quick reference. As in
The Great Railway
volumes, I have also thought it useful to include a cast of characters, a chronology, and, where possible, source notes. The point of view, of course, has not changed.
Klondike
remains the story of a quest. It is an allegory as well as a history and should be read as such.

The international character of the last great gold rush has made
Klondike
a popular work outside of Canada. The book has not only been published in England and the United States but it has also been translated into such unexpected tongues as Hungarian, Czech, Slovene, and German. Its influence, I am happy to report, has been considerable; indeed, of all my books this is the only one that seems to me to have had any influence at all.
(The Comfortable Pew
, by contrast, has caused scarcely a chip in the façade of the institution it criticized.)

It is now clear that the publication of
Klondike
touched off a process that helped to open the eyes of Canadians, and Americans as well, to the presence in the North of a vanishing historical resource.
Klondike
was the first book which attempted to tell the story of the stampede as a coherent whole and with a wealth of detail. It is difficult now to recall the indifference with which the Trail of ’98 was viewed before its publication. Scarcely a soul, for instance, had been over the Chilkoot Pass for half a century. The tourist traffic to Dawson City, which had reached a peak in the twenties after Robert Service’s literary success, was declining so badly that an attempt by Canadian Pacific Airlines to restore a riverboat to active service met with financial failure. While I was working on the research in the fifties, I can recall more than one colleague (and more than one Klondiker) saying to me: “Why would you want to write a book about the Klondike? Who will buy it?”

But in the first three months after its publication ten thousand Canadians bought it – a sale that astonished both author and publisher, since it was unprecedented at the time. One of those who bought the book was Tom Patterson, who had sparked the Stratford Shakespearean Festival. After reading
Klondike
, Patterson decided that an attempt ought to be made to restore and preserve some of Dawson’s historical sites and that this could best be done by launching a Gold Rush Festival on the site, supported by federal funds. It was, admittedly, a bizarre idea, but it actually came to fruition in the summer of 1962. Because it “lost money” (what festival does not?), the press branded it a failure. In retrospect, it can be seen to have been an overwhelming success.

The Gold Rush Festival caused the immediate restoration of the only structure extant from stampede days – the Palace Grand Dance Hall – and of one of the historic river boats that were crumbling to dust on the ways along the Yukon. (The money was not allocated without a spirited debate in Parliament over the advisability of appropriating federal funds to recreate “a brothel.”) In addition, the festival also reversed the declining tourist traffic, trebling it in the festival year. The reversal has continued. More important, it helped to change official attitudes towards the historical heritage of the Yukon. Since that time other buildings in Dawson have been restored, and that work is continuing. Carmack’s Discovery Claim is one of several sites that have been marked with a suitable plaque. A second steamboat has been rebuilt in Whitehorse and is open to tourists. Most important of all, it now seems likely that the entire Trail of ’98, from Skagway and Dyea to Lake Bennett and eventually to Dawson itself, will become part of an international gold rush park.

The initial impetus for such a park came from the Americans. Plans are already well advanced to restore sections of Skagway (in fact, by 1971 board sidewalks had replaced concrete on Broadway Avenue). The trail from Dyea to the Chilkoot’s summit has been repaired and several camp grounds have been established en route. A historic research study of the area was completed late in 1970 for the National Park Service of the United States Department of the Interior. One of the major sources for this study was
Klondike
.

The Canadian government in 1971 commissioned a Vancouver firm to examine the area between the Chilkoot Pass and Lake Bennett and make specific recommendations for what is to be the first stage of the Canadian section of the park. I was appointed historic adviser to the group and in August, 1971, with a party of about forty persons, including both United States and Canadian park officials, I climbed the famous pass from Sheep Camp and walked over the old trail that leads down past Crater Lake, Long Lake, and Lindemann to the green waters of Bennett.

Here, again, the influence of the book was apparent. It has become, one of the Americans told me, the bible of the proposed park. Everyone seemed to have a worn copy, as do many of the individual hikers who are now crossing the Chilkoot each summer in ever-increasing numbers (a Swiss couple, for instance, was carrying a German edition). Some there were on that trip who seemed to know the book better than I did myself and who were able to refer to passages that I had forgotten or to correct me on points on which I had become hazy.

And so, almost three-quarters of a century after my father climbed the Chilkoot, I followed in his footsteps, clambering on hands and knees over man-high boulders, slippery with fog, in the teeth of a sixty-mile wind that screamed through the notch of the pass. Some of the paraphernalia of the stampede days were still to be seen: old rubber boots, rusting food tins, the remnants of barrels, the bones of dogs and horses, the skeletons of boats and sleds, tangled cables, rope, glass insulators, and bits of tramway machinery – and, here and there, the rotting foundations of a cabin or a shack. These artifacts are also part of our heritage – the fading reminders of an incredible moment out of the past – and it is important that some of them be preserved before they are carted away by souvenir hunters, just as it is important that this hike through history be made accessible to those who wish to follow in the wake of the stampeders and re-live, in some fashion, the experiences of ’98. For no man who crawls over the Chilkoot can help but think back on those who performed that feat not once, but thirty times or more, in the chill of winter, with a fifty-pound pack pressing down upon their shoulders.

As I wrote in the 1958 edition, my whole life has been conditioned by the Klondike; it haunts my dreams and my memories, and although at the time I said I would never return, I find myself going back periodically to the ghost town that was, for so many childhood years, my home.

My father, having failed to reach the gold-fields by the abortive Stikine Trail in 1898, crossed the Chilkoot Pass and took a canoe down the Yukon River with the main stampede. He was a University of New Brunswick graduate, spoiling for adventure. In the summer of ’98 he staked a claim on Quigley Gulch. It produced nothing but gravel, but, nonetheless, he lived for forty years in Dawson City, where he was variously miner, labourer, cook, Mountie, French professor, cabinet-maker, school principal, dentist, engineer, and civil servant.

My mother came to the Klondike as a kindergarten teacher in 1907. She married my father in 1912 when he was a labourer working on Bonanza Creek for the old Yukon Gold Company. They spent the first summer of their marriage in a tent on Sourdough Gulch. Her own story of that odd era can be read in her book, I
Married the Klondike
.

I was born in 1920 in Whitehorse but lived the first twelve years of my life in the shell of Dawson City, a town of about twelve hundred in those days. I suppose, really, that the research for this book began at that time, for my boyhood memories are tied up with the relics of the great stampede and its aftermath.

Our home was across the street from the cabin of Robert Service, who had known my parents but had departed the North before I was born; the cabin had become a shrine which tourists visited each summer. I used to wade in the shallow waters of Bonanza Creek and, in the winter, drive my dog up the hard-packed snow of the Klondike Valley road. As children we played steamboat in the relics of some of the old stern-wheelers rotting in the boneyard across the river.

The names associated with that other era were always with us: there were a Harper and a Hansen Street in Dawson, and the name “Ladue” in cracked paint on a faded building, and a village called Carmacks up the Yukon River, and an Ogilvie Bridge, and a McQuesten Creek, and a town called Mayo, and two children named Henderson with whom I played at public school.

Around me were the relics of the early days, human and inanimate: old saloons, dance halls, and gambling-houses, creaky and vacant, crammed with Klondike bric-a-brac – old seltzer bottles and tarnished gold-scales; ancient calendars depicting
the Floradora
Sextette; stacks of gold-pans long disused and rusty; oil paintings, thick with dust, of voluptuous women; the occasional satin slipper, worm-eaten; creaky pianos long gone flat; chipped mahogany bars, glasses, beds, armchairs, hand organs, porcelain chamberpots, spittoons.

And once, digging into a dusty trunk in an abandoned dance hall which my father was using as a workshop in which to build a boat, I came upon a bundle of love letters tied with pink ribbon – from a miner on the creeks to a soubrette on Dawson’s gay way.

On the streets, in the hotel lobbies, and, indeed, in my own home were the living reminders of that era: men and women whose lives had been wrenched into a new pattern by the experience of the stampede. They did not talk about it specifically, except at odd times, as men sometimes, at odd times, talk of war; but, like the experience of war, the stampede was always an undercurrent in the adult conversation that swirled about me. Indeed, as a child, it never occurred to me that this was anything but normal; I did not realize I was living in a queer town (a ghost town, really), any more than I realized that there were people in the world who did not have this gold-rush background.

Yet, looking back on it today, I can see how remarkable and unusual it all was: the red-bearded man in tatters who sat in the public library gobbling up books on philosophy; the remittance men from England, with their impeccable public-school background, who were visitors in our home; the various cosmopolites not usually found in small towns; the little Japanese who read his way through the
Encyclopaedia Britannica;
the Frenchwoman who sold Paris fashions from her frame store; the gaudily dressed, heavily rouged and veiled women who were the last relics of Dawson’s dance-hall era.

Later, when I was in my late teens, I returned to the Klondike for three seasons and worked as a labourer on Dominion Creek, for the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation, in order to earn my university fees. Once again I was caught up, drowned almost, in the memories of the stampede. The valleys in those days were a thick mass of shovels, picks, wheelbarrows, machinery, cabins, dumps, old flumes, rotting sluiceboxes. Ancient newspapers from ’98 littered the ground. Old road-houses and tottering ghost towns from the old days were everywhere – and old miners, too. Here, really, my interest in the period began, but it was not until after the war, in 1946, that I started some hesitant research for a series of radio talks on the subject. This grew, eventually, into more serious research, and the present book is the final result.