STORIES FROM NORTHERN CANADA AND ALASKA.

Glacier, the Valdez Glacier

A camp at the top of the Valdez Glacier–a long, rugged way from home

The Valdez Glacier looked easy, and in 1897 and 1898 when promoters invited gold rushers to take “The All American Route” to the Klondike, they had yet to learn that hustlers offering helpful advice were just about the only people making money from the Klondike Gold Rush. They came to Valdez and the Valdez Glacier in ignorance. Some left it a lot more educated. Some never left it at all.

At Seattle expensive gear bothered some. But they headed north to get rich. It took money to make money, right? They packed it up, loaded it on a ship, and sailed up from Seattle through the North Pacific to Valdez, Alaska.

The ships sailed smoothly into the North Pacific, but then they had to cross the Gulf of Alaska. The sky alternated snow and sleet and the wind blew at gale force. The ship rocked and rolled them into prostrate seasickness. And the smell of other people’s seasickness prostrated them more.

Finally. Valdez. Thank God.

Valdez didn’t really exist yet—rushers created it. An icy mud flat fronted the Glacier. The ship’s crew threw gear off onto the ice. Five hundred immigrants at a time, knowing more ships and more immigrants came right behind, gathered their gear into piles.

Each acquired a six-foot sled, loaded it with 200 pounds of gear, harnessed themselves to it and dragged it five miles to the foot of the glacier. Each went back for more… and more… and more until they had it all at the foot of the glacier.

They hadn’t even started yet. From sea level the glacier climbed in “benches” to its summit a mile up in the air.

Two weeks might get some of a “rusher’s stuff up to the third bench. There they had to rig a windlass to lift it onto the bench. People died on the way. Some fell into deep crevasses. Some simply worked too hard and collapsed.

George Hazlett described the exertion. “Think of a man hitching himself up to a sled, putting on 150 pounds and pulling that load from 7:00 am till 2:00 pm, eating frozen bread and beans and drinking snow water for his lunch, then walking back the distance of 10 ½ miles.”

Three weeks out of Valdez the lucky ones reached the fourth bench—3,660 feet. A full month out they reached the mile-high summit. Behind them avalanches buried not individual men but parties—groups of men.

A camp at the third bench, getting ready to winch it all up.

From the summit they had only to cross the rugged mountains of the Alaska wilderness and the Continental Divide—cross it the long way—to Eagle and the Yukon River.

The route

Women Came to the Klondike Too

Jack London Found a Different Kind of Klondike Gold

Women as well as men heard the news of gold in the Klondike. If men endured hell to get there, women did too. With husbands or without them, miners or miner miners, women came north in droves.

Some came out of desperation, hoping for money to support themselves or their families. Some came for adventure, to escape boredom and routine. They brought all kinds of skills. Lady miners came. So did businesswomen, journalists, cooks, entertainers, teachers, physicians… even nuns.

The harsh reality of the route to the Klondike turned some women back. It turned men back too. Some women died on the way to the Klondike or on the Klondike. And some women who made it, found themselves in a situation more desperate than the one they left at home.

But Annie Hall Strong, who stopped in Skagway, wrote a column for the Skagway newspaper—“Advice for Women”.

Her friend Harriet Pullen arrived in Skagway flat broke. But she could bake pies. And she could drive a team of horses. Harriet stayed after the Gold Rush; became a Skagway institution.

Mollie Brackett came north with her husband and her father in law. She took photos of life in Skagway during the Gold Rush; documented the dramatic country, immortalized both good guys and bad ones.

Shaaw Tiaa, also known as Kate Carmack, accompanied her husband and his partners to the Klondike where they made the famous strike that started the Gold Rush in the first place.

I guess you could call Kate the mother of the Gold Rush.

More men than women rushed for gold, of course. But a lot of incredibly tough, courageous ladies came too.

Jack London Found a Different Kind of Klondike Gold

Jack London found a different kind of gold in the Klondike. Leaving frustrated poverty behind in Oakland, California, he sailed north with a partner in 1897 to look for the traditional kind. At Port Townsend, Washington, they changed ships and sailed on to Juneau, Alaska. In Juneau, stories about the incredibly difficult and dangerous path from Skagway to the Klondike, scared his partner into giving up and heading home.

Another writer who brought gold home from the Klondike

Alone, London survived the incredible climb up Chilkoot Pass to the Canadian border. He navigated the raging Whitehorse Rapids. He negotiated the Yukon River to Dawson City. And he built himself a rough cabin in the Klondike—just in time to hibernate in it through a miserable winter.

Too broke to eat right, London got scurvy. And London found not one grain of gold.

But, if he didn’t find the mineral labelled “Au” on the periodic table, he found something equally valuable. The atmosphere, the lore, the sheer drama of survival in the subarctic north accumulated in his fertile mind, a mind thoroughly ready to make use of it.

Flat broke, London worked his way home stoking coal on a steamship. And, back in California, he put pen to paper. Page after page of the drama of the north piled up on his writing table. And in 1899 OVERLAND MONTHLY payed him $5.00 and published his story, “To the Man on the Trail”.

A few months later ATLANTIC MONTHLY payed $40 for “An Odyssey of the North”; published it in January 1900. And later in 1900 came his first book—a collection of stories, called A SON OF THE WOLF. A second collection of stories, THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS, followed in 1901.

Other collections of stories followed and in 1903, sales of his first novel, CALL OF THE WILD, immediately made it clear that the knowledge and atmosphere he accumulated on the Klondike had as much value as gold. Unfortunately, London didn’t get the Gold. He had sold all rights to the novel for $2,000.

The Hollywood version of Call of the Wild

Robert Service, Poet of the Gold Rush

Strikes, Gold Strikes, in the Far North

Robert Service lived a long way from Northern Canada—in Glasgow, Scotland. Son of an heiress he got a good education; worked in a shipping office then a bank. He wrote his first poem at age 6. Studied literature at the University of Glasgow. Robert found inspiration in the works of Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, travelers and adventurers who used their adventures to inform their writing.

In 1895 Robert sailed to Montreal then boarded a train to travel west to Vancouver. There the Canadian Bank of Commerce hired him and dispatched him to remote Yukon Territory, just in time for the great Klondike Gold Rush.

Service had no desire to prospect or become a miner, but the legends of the Gold Rush inspired him. He quickly wrote two poems that the world loved.

The Shooting of Dan McGrew:

“A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon.

The kid that handles the music box was hitting a jag-time tune.

Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew.

And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.”

Hollywood version of the shooting of Dan

The Cremation of Sam McGee

“Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.

Why he left his home in the South to roam ‘round the pole, God only knows.

He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;

Though he’d often say in his homely way that ‘he’d sooner live in hell.”

Inspired, Robert wrote more poems and in 1907 he published them in a collection, Songs of a Sourdough, which went through ten printings in its first year.

Over his lifetime, Service published forty-five verse collections, two autobiographies, and six novels. He served in WWI as an ambulance driver, and appeared briefly opposite Marlene Dietrich in the movie, The Spoilers.

Strikes, Gold Strikes, in the Far North

Small Gold strikes occurred during the last decades of the 19^th century in Alaska. Sitka had one. Windham Bay had one. In 1880 Joseph Juneau and Richard Harris made a bigger strike in Juneau.

Then Skookum Jim, his friend Tagish Charlie and George Carmack made a massive strike in Canada, at Rabbit Creek in the Klondike. Prospectors from relatively nearby Forty-mile, Sixty-mile, Eagle and Circle City rushed to Rabbit Creek and turned it into Bonanza Creek.

Stampede to the Klondike

From the far-off Klondike it took nearly a year for word of the strikes at Bonanza Creek to reach the outside world. But in July 1897 two steamships made their way into harbors in the lower 48.

The Portland docked in Seattle and The Seattle Post Intelligencer breathlessly reported that the ship carried “more than a ton of gold”. When the Excelsior arrived in San Francisco the next day, and The San Francisco Examiner reported that it carried tons of gold; headlined the front-page story, “Streams of Gold from the Klondike.”

The word exploded, an irresistible siren song, across a country mired in recession. Men and women in every state the Union, desperate for opportunity, heard it. Thousands packed, pulled up stakes and followed the siren north.

Thousands of others, caring little for the backbreaking work of prospecting and mining, saw opportunity in the prospectors themselves. Wherever they went they would eat and drink and use up equipment. They would want booze and sex.

These thousands went north to mine the miners.

As a stampede of gold seekers descended on Skagway, Alaska in 1897. Miner miner, Soapy Smith came with them.

As the crow flies Lake Bennett lay just a few miles from Skagway and from Lake Bennett the Yukon River flowed north to the Gold Fields. Unfortunately, the stampeders weren’t crows, and the “few miles” to Lake Bennett climbed thousands of rugged feet–from sea level to the top of the coastal range.

But the stampede pushed up through Chilkoot Pass and White Pass, and miners came to Lake Bennett. And at Bennett, miner miners, John Barret, Frank Turner, and Thomas Geiger turned themselves into hoteliers.

Miner miners who ran steamship lines promoted an alternative to the Skagway/Yukon River route; called it the “All American Trail” (absurd on the face of it since the Klondike lay safely across the border in Canada). A second flood of outsiders flowed to the Port of Valdez on Prince William Sound and headed north over the supremely treacherous Valdez Glacier.

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Rika Wallen’s Iconic Roadhouse

Rika followed her brother, Carl, to the United States from Sweden, lived for a time on his farm in Minnesota then moved on to San Francisco where she cooked for the fabulously wealthy Hills Brothers Coffee family. She came to San Francisco as Erica, but an affectionate estate staff shortened her name to Rika.

The monster earthquake that levelled San Francisco in 1906 destroyed Rika’s prospects along with the city. Not one to give up, Rika struggled for a few years; but, when she heard that the Alaska gold camps offered plenty of work, it occurred to her that cold Alaska might resemble the home in Sweden that she fondly remembered.

Bennett Came First

Bennett, in 1898 and 1899, made sense as a first stop in Yukon Territory for the thousands of would be miners passing through on their way to the Klondike gold fields. The majority of them made their way on ships to Skagway, Alaska; struggled up the Chilkoot or the White pass; and settled at the end of Lake Bennett to build boats and wait for the ice to clear from the Yukon River—the rest of the route north.

Stampede to the Klondike

Among the thousands coming to mine gold, a few came, in the words of John Firth in his fascinating new book, The Caribou Hotel, “to mine miners”. Miner miners, John Barret, Frank Turner, and Thomas Geiger turned themselves into hoteliers.

First, Barret set up a liquor store and bar in a tent next to the Dawson Hotel, itself a collection of tents. When the ice cleared in May 1898 and seven thousand boats launched into the lake and down the river, Barret and his new partners, Turner and Geiger, stayed in Bennett to convert Barret’s bar into The Yukon Hotel.

June 1899 found The Yukon Hotel in a two story building with twenty-five rooms—the lap of luxury in Bennett. Rooms had baths and, if their toilets drained directly into the lake, nobody cared.

Besides, The Yukon Hotel offered the most commodious bar in town.

Other miner miners, of course, saw the opportunity. Other hotels came and brought cutthroat competition. Among other tactics, hoteliers payed hookers to hang around their establishments.

Firth quotes a Yukon Sun review from April 1900, “I would advise respectable women, travelling alone… to be careful in their selection of hotels at Bennett.”

Meanwhile, other miner miners had turned to the railroad business; gouged a path for narrow gauge rails out of the White Pass cliffs. Newcomers no longer needed to climb the passes to Bennett, but the WP&YT quickly created a problem for Bennett. As the railroad extended its rails, the spot on the map known as Caribou Crossing, also on Lake Bennett and a lot closer to the Yukon River, made more sense than Bennett as the first stop on the lake.

When, in July 1900, the WP&YT replaced its Bennett depot with a new one in the town they called “Carcross”, Bennett died on the spot. By then The Yukon Hotel had already died. The partners, seeing the handwriting on the wall, had moved on.

Bennett today

But another hotel would come to Carcross, and the legend of the fascinating little town would center on it—The Caribou Hotel of Firth’s fascinating history.

A Box of Rough Planks

The Alaska Highway the Civilians Inherited in 1943

A box of rough planks, lined with Army blankets, carried Clyde Hudson home from Yukon Territory in 1943. He had come north, along with thousands of other civilians, because, at the end of 1942, the Alaska Highway, at best a rough draft, needed a lot of improving. When, in the spring of 1943, the baton passed from the soldiers of the Corps of Engineers to civilian contractors, the trials and danger of a hostile wilderness passed with it.

Civilians on the Alaska Highway Project

Among many other problems, that very first winter left the Highway’s timber bridges in bad shape. When bridge contractor Bates and Rogers came north with a contract to replace them, they brought Clyde and Bodie Bodine with them. Clyde went out on the road and Bodie moved into a barracks in Whitehorse.

The company assigned Bodie a pickup and work that took him from bridge to bridge up and down the Highway. Since Bates and Rogers built bridges that summer from the Liard River in British Columbia all the way to the White River near the Alaska border, Bodie and his pickup saw a lot of Highway.

Bodie brought home good memories from his time in Yukon—except for his memory of the fate of Clyde Hudson.

Clyde operated heavy equipment of all kinds, and he moved, with his equipment, up and down the Highway. One day Clyde loaded an oversize crane on a lowboy trailer, climbed into the tractor with the driver and headed out toward the next bridge. As they struggled up a hill, the driver tried to downshift and suddenly he had a problem.

The transmission jammed and, try as he might, the driver couldn’t get the truck back in gear. As they rapidly slowed, Clyde and the driver realized that very soon they would stop; and, when they did, the truck wouldn’t just sit there. It would roll, out of control, back down the hill.

As the desperate driver worked the clutch and jammed at the stubbornly grinding shift lever, Clyde threw his door open and jumped out to throw blocks behind the tractor wheels. But when Clyde piled through the door, his foot caught and he sprawled flat on the ground, directly behind a tire already rolling backwards. The tire rolled over him, and he died instantly.

Bodie got the sad news from a phone call to Whitehorse. They would bring Clyde’s mangled corpse to the warehouse there. Bodie needed to get carpenters to construct a box out of rough lumber, and he needed to line the box with army blankets.

They built the box and Clyde got delivered to it quickly, but he lay in the box in the warehouse for three days. It took that long to get him on a WP&YT boxcar down to Skagway and then out on a ship through the Lynn Canal, the first leg of his long, sad trip home to Illinois.

A Civilian Camp on the Highway 1943

Minerals and Gold

Minerals seeded the streams and rivers of the isolated far north. If the rugged country offered animals with exquisite pelts, it also offered gold. But for a very long time the tiny, scattered populations of First Nations natives and fur traders knew nothing of minerals or gold.

Outsiders Inevitably Came to the Far North

During the last decades of the 19^th century men found gold in in Sitka and Windham Bay. In 1880 Joseph Juneau and Richard Harris struck gold in Juneau. Word spread, and a trickle of hardy prospectors began making their way north.

Getting to the gold took guts and stamina

They used, of course, the same trail systems as the primordial tribes and the traders; extended them just a bit here and there. The few early prospectors blended in. They rested, refitted and even made homes at the trading post towns and villages. Some took native brides. And, like their predecessors, they changed the world of the natives, teaching them the value of gold and how to seek it.

Down on the Alaska Peninsula the Tlingit tribe controlled the difficult routes over the coastal mountains into the Yukon interior. They used those routes—one over the White Pass and the other over the Chilkoot—to trade with the tribes of the interior. In the 1890’s “Skookum Jim”, a member of the Tlingit Tribe, worked as a packer on the Chilkoot and had spent years exploring the White Pass.

In 1896 Jim and his friend “Tagish Charlie” accompanied George Carmack, a prospector from Seattle, to the area around Rabbit Creek in the Klondike. There, on August 17, they made the gold strike that would reverberate around the world.

Prospecting in Alaska