As the Crow Flies

As the crow flies, Lake Bennett lay just a few miles from Skagway. Theoretically Klondike gold rushers could travel those few miles from the Skagway dock to Lake Bennett, build or buy a boat and cruise down Lake Bennett to Carcross and the Yukon River. The Yukon could then float them downstream all the way to Dawson City and the Klondike.

Unfortunately, it did not work like that.

Link to another story about another route “Glacier, the Valdez Glacier”

First of all, the Klondike Gold Rushers were not crows, so as the crow flies didn’t apply. The few miles to Lake Bennett climbed from sea level to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, thousands of rugged feet almost straight up. And the rushers had to traverse it on foot, carrying packs.

Second, those who made it to Lake Bennett and acquired a boat, faced 548 difficult miles of Yukon River. And the Yukon immediately confronted them with the Whitehorse Rapids. By June of 1897, the rapids had already claimed 200 boats.

Finally, the river offered passage only after the Yukon ice broke up in the spring and only until the ice reformed in the fall.

In early May of 1898 a motley flotilla of seven thousand boats and rafts lay poised at Lake Bennett.  Builders were working frantically on as many as a thousand more at Lake Lindeman and Caribou Crossing.  The boat builders stripped every bit of forest they could reach.

On May 29^th, word reached the would-be miners that the ice down river had broken.  An incredible flotilla–canoes, scows, rafts and barges–burst like race horses from the gates out into Lake Bennett, surging toward the narrows at Carcross.  Attrition, of course, began immediately. Many of the vessels in the ragtag flotilla fell apart before they even got across Tagish Lake.

In the end those who actually made it down the Yukon to Lake Lebarge and through the final leg to the crowded docks at Dawson City were a lucky minority.  The path from Lake Bennett was littered with the detritus of those who tried and failed.

Gold Rush National Park at Lake Bennett

Like generations of historical predecessors who found themselves travelling through the subarctic north, the Klondike Gold Rushers ran smack into how very difficult travelling there could be. And, like their predecessors, they wound up using and improving prehistoric paths. The improvements formed important parts of the reality the Corps would confront in 1942.