Travelers' Tales Alaska (16 page)

For nine months, from September 1897 to May 1898, roughly 25,000 aspiring prospectors stampeded through this slot, chasing dreams of instant wealth they thought waited along Canada's Klondike River. The thirty-three-mile trail from the Gulf of Alaska at Dyea Inlet over Chilkoot Pass to
Lake Bennett at the headwaters of the Yukon River became a tumbling tent city of supply dumps, saloons, bunkhouses, whorehouses, and casinos. Stampeders who couldn't hire professional packers traversed each foot of the route thirty to forty times, ferrying the year's worth of supplies the Canadian Mounties required for entrance to the Yukon Territory.

The Klondike gold seekers who traveled the Chilkoot Trail bore little semblance to the frontiersmen mythologized in the novels of Robert Service and Jack London. They were raw beginners at wilderness travel, hence the epic tales. But what they lacked in experience, these dreamers made up for in optimism; they called this particular segment of trail that I'm hiking the “Golden Stairs.” There had been gold rushes throughout the 1800s—to California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, British Columbia, South Africa, and Australia—but nothing as large or frantic as the Klondike Stampede.…

As I prepare to start out on the Chilkoot Trail, I look around at the tidal flats at Dyea, which bear little trace of the madness that occurred here almost a century ago. Only puffins and sea lions populate the once-hectic estuary of the Taiya
River. Despite this tranquility, at certain times the Chilkoot Trail is hardly a reclusive wilderness experience. Each July and August an average of 3,000 people backpack across the pass, following in the footsteps of the stampeders through Klondike Gold Rush International Historic Park, often referred to as “the world's longest museum.”

As I check my pack contents one more time, I think about the gold seekers who hastily unloaded their supplies at Dyea Cove and Skagway Bay, about ten miles south, in early August 1897. The horses, skillets, axes, and food needed to survive the trip to the gold fields were dumped off the boats onto tidal mud flats. Thirty-foot tides claimed many of the beached outfits before the supplies could be moved to higher ground, and for months, knots of sobbing men lined the shore. Naturalist John Muir witnessed the chaotic scene and likened it to “a nest of ants taken into a strange country and stirred up by a stick.”

The track before me plunges into a lush coastal rain forest of birch, poplar, spruce, and fir. Thick banks of dryopteris ferns and broad-leaved devil's club wall the trail as it winds past still, mirrored flood channels of the Taiya River. Common mergansers float beneath the first footbridge, nine downy hatchlings bunched around their mother's tail, each one perfect as a dandelion ball. Black bear scat is common and full of lush spring grasses.

Faint relics of the gold-rush insanity litter the Chilkoot today. Old beams, telegraph wires, and rusted flywheels are scattered amid the white flowers growing throughout the forest understory. Tall conifers appear, draped in green tendrils of blyoria lichen. The trail enters a glade at the confluence of the Taiya and Nourse rivers. A tent town called Canyon City sprang up here during the rush, only to disappear again when
a railroad was completed over White Pass—a competing parallel route to the Yukon—in late 1899. Served by a blacksmith shop, several restaurants, and saloons, the population topped out at around 6,000.

Crossing the river on a suspension bridge, I find a large rusted steam boiler tucked among the firs and poplars. It helped power the most sophisticated of four tramways that creaked over the Golden Stairs by spring 1898. This one ran seven miles over the pass and contained the longest cable span in the world: 2,200 feet between towers. During its brief career, the tram pumped cargo into the Yukon at the rate of nine tons an hour—for those with the money.

The stampeders were a different breed from the experienced sourdoughs who initially struck pay dirt and triggered the rush. “They come from desks and counters; have never packed, and are not even accustomed to hard labour,” wrote Tappan Adney, a correspondent for
Harper's Illustrated Weekly.
One veteran miner looked over the assemblage and shook his head. “They have no more idea what they are going to than that horse has.”

No one who started out from the coast later than September 1897 could reach and float the Yukon River before freeze-up. Some gold seekers gave up, but most dug in and began relaying loads up and over Chilkoot Pass through the howling Alaskan winter, planning to have their outfit moved and their boats built when the frozen Yukon River broke apart in spring. The usual method was to haul the entire gear pile slowly up the pass in five-mile stages, moving about sixty-five pounds per trip.

The trail leaves Canyon City, climbing steeply past vistas of the rugged Nourse River drainage, with its ripsaw skyline and crenelated glaciers. I wander slowly up through the dark, shadowed forest and drift into Pleasant Camp at dusk, glad to find
the site unoccupied. After the gloom of the Taiya Canyon, this open river-front camp must have impressed the stampeders—as it does me—with its pastoral charm. All night, meteorites streak across Ursa Major, the Great Bear.

As autumn gave way to winter in 1897, the Chilkoot Trail swelled with struggling packers, staggering horses, and howling dogs. Mixed in among the gold-crazed men were con artists, card sharks, and outlaws. Good bunco artists could make $2,000 a day. Shell games sprang up next to campfires, and the dark of night was particularly dangerous. Sunrise often revealed corpses along more remote portions of the trail, their pants pockets turned inside out.

My own dawn is more tranquil, marked by low clouds turning to rain. I dawdle the morning away, then strike out on the wet and squishy trail, its fern banks glistening. At Sheep Camp the terrain opens, offering views up through scrubby alders to a huge, convex shield of granite, stippled with snow and stunted trees. The pass itself remains hidden behind clouds.

Sheep Camp offered the last flat ground, shelter, and firewood before the pass. A traditional stopping place for Indian packers and mountain goat hunters, it mutated overnight into a stampede city of 4,000, and bad weather in the pass occasionally swelled its numbers to 8,000. Sheep Camp was the limit of livestock travel on the Chilkoot, and many prospectors simply abandoned horses or dogs here. Injured and starving animals wandered through the camps until the harried miners shot them by the hundreds and dumped them in the Taiya. Pneumonia and dysentery raged up and down the Chilkoot. One night there were seventeen spinal meningitis deaths in Sheep Camp alone.

A red-headed woodpecker busily forages on a poplar, hopping in a counterclockwise spiral up the trunk. Foaming
cascades roar down the surrounding cliffs, braiding and sheeting over the rocks in a violent staircase effect. I come across Upper Sheep Camp Shelter, a log cabin with wood stove, table, and logbook. The entries are an amusing counterpoint to the grimness that occurred here years before: “This golf bag's getting filled with rainwater.” “Beautiful trail! Now if I could just get this stinking Julie Andrews song out of my head.” Then the words of a twelve-year-old boy from Calgary stop me cold: “The stampeders climbed the pass with thoughts of striking it rich. So why do we do it?”

I'm pondering the question when in bursts a young Swiss couple. Ursula and Markus spotted a black bear and are still wide-eyed and trembling after their encounter with what to Europeans is a nearly mythical creature. According to the hut log, Bigfoot, Elvis, and Liberace sightings are also common on foggy days near the pass. Ursula holds up her bear bell proudly.

I trudge on. Sheep Camp and treeline fall quickly behind. Snowfields must be crossed, willow thickets negotiated, and boulders scrambled. The Taiya bubbles beneath dangerously thin snow bridges. I don snowshoes and begin to climb up Long Hill into a massive glacial amphitheater. These broadening alpine vistas afforded the gold seekers a sudden overview of the phenomena that engulfed them: “We passed hundreds of prospectors moving forward singly and in small parties,” wrote stampeder Edward Morgan, “some men staggering under packs loaded on their backs, others drawing or pushing small sleds laden with their outfits, still others driving sleds, moving sometimes, under dog power. The procession of toiling humanity thinned out as we climbed and many of them had ceased all attempts…seated themselves on their belongings, and hung up signs advertising: Outfit for Sale Cheap.”

Women were also present in the long struggling line. Diarist William Haskell wrote that he “…could not fail to notice many
instances… in which the women showed a fortitude superior to the men. It was a revelation, almost a mystery. But after a while, I began to account for it as the natural result of an escape from the multitude of social customs and restraints, which in civilized society hedge about a woman's life.… Her nature suddenly becomes aware of a freedom, which is in a way exhilarating.” About a dozen women became professional packers.

Intersecting mountain goat tracks flow down one side of the valley and up the other toward steep glacial seracs. In September 1897, these same ice fields developed into a temporary lake, and when the ice dam finally failed, a twenty-foot wall of water rushed down the granite aprons. Stampeders climbing Long Hill scattered as the flood crashed into a
rest area beneath a giant boulder called the Stone House. Forty tents and outfits were wiped out.

I investigate the remains of old tram towers, then cross the valley and begin climbing a gully that looks like it has seen its share of snow slides. With the nonstop winter traffic pouring through this narrow valley, it was inevitable that an avalanche would occur. On April 3, 1898, the first good travel day after two months of heavy storms, stampeders were passing up and down this snowfield when it gave way. Within minutes 1,000 rescuers had arrived from Sheep Camp. For days, they dug trenches through the debris, locating many victims alive, some of them thirty-feet down. One ox was found chewing its cud. Victims and rescuers could hear each other. Last goodbyes were hollered through the snowpack. More than sixty people died. [Avalanche debris quickly hardens into a cement-like firmness and people buried by avalanches seldom survive more than a half-hour of burial.] The corpses were mushed down the valley to a makeshift morgue where Frank “Soapy” Smith declared himself coroner and stripped the bodies of valuables. When avalanche debris melted the following spring, undiscovered corpses floated on the surface of a pool alongside the trail.