Klondike Read online

  Copyright © 1972 by Pierre Berton Enterprises Ltd.

  Anchor Canada paperback edition 2001

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher — or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency — is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Anchor Canada and colophon are trademarks.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Berton, Pierre, 1920-

  Klondike : the last great gold rush, 1896–1899

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67364-8

  I. Klondike River Valley (Yukon) – Gold discoveries. I. Title.

  FC4022.3.B468 2001 971.9’1 C2001-930604-0

  F1095.K5’7 2001

  Published in Canada by

  Anchor Canada, a division of

  Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website:

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  “All my life,” he said, “I have searched for the treasure. I have sought it in the high places, and in the narrow. I have sought it in deep jungles, and at the ends of rivers, and in dark caverns – and yet have not found it.

  “Instead, at the end of every trail, I have found you awaiting me. And now you have become familiar to me, though I cannot say I know you well. Who are you?”

  And the stranger answered:

  “Thyself.”

  – From an old tale

  Books by Pierre Berton

  The Royal Family

  The Mysterious North

  Klondike

  Just Add Water and Stir

  Adventures of a Columnist

  Fast Fast Fast Relief

  The Big Sell

  The Comfortable Pew

  The Cool, Crazy, Committed World of the Sixties

  The Smug Minority

  The National Dream

  The Last Spike

  Drifting Home

  Hollywood’s Canada

  My Country

  The Dionne Years

  The Wild Frontier

  The Invasion of Canada

  Flames Across the Border

  Why We Act Like Canadians

  The Promised Land

  Vimy

  Starting Out

  The Arctic Grail

  The Great Depression

  Niagara: A History of the Falls

  My Times: Living with History

  1967, The Last Good Year

  Picture Books

  The New City (with Henri Rossier)

  Remember Yesterday

  The Great Railway

  The Klondike Quest

  Pierre Berton’s Picture Book of Niagara Falls

  Winter

  The Great Lakes

  Seacoasts

  Pierre Berton’s Canada

  Anthologies

  Great Canadians

  Pierre and Janet Berton’s Canadian Food Guide

  Historic Headlines

  Farewell to the Twentieth Century

  Worth Repeating

  Welcome to the Twenty-first Century

  Fiction

  Masquerade (pseudonym Lisa Kroniuk)

  Books for Young Readers

  The Golden Trail

  The Secret World of Og

  Adventures in Canadian History (22 volumes)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Other Books by This Author

  Maps

  Dedication

  Preface to the Revised Edition

  Cast of Major Characters

  The Golden Highway

  ONE 1. The Pilgrims

  2. “Gold-all same like this!”

  3. The hermits of Fortymile

  4. The land of the Golden Rule

  TWO 1. The prospector and the squaw man

  2. The exculpation of Lying George

  3. Moose pastures

  4. The kings of Eldorado

  5. Henderson’s luck

  THREE 1. Clarence Berry strikes it rich

  2. The death of Circle City

  3. The birth of Dawson

  4. A friend in need

  5. Big Alex and Swiftwater Bill

  6. City of gold

  FOUR 1. The treasure ships

  2. Rich man, poor man

  3. A ton of gold

  4. Klondicitis

  5. Warnings all unheeded

  6. Balloons, boatsleds, and bicycles

  7. Fearful passage

  FIVE 1. Captain Billy’s last stand

  2. The swarming sands of Skagway

  3. The dead horse trail

  4. Hell on earth

  5. The human serpent

  SIX 1. Starvation winter

  2. Revolt on the Yukon

  3. A dollar a waltz

  4. Only a coal miner’s daughter

  5. Greenhorns triumphant

  6. The Saint of Dawson

  SEVEN 1. The trails of Ninety-eight

  2. Rich man’s route

  3. Frozen highways

  4. “Bury me here, where I failed”

  5. Overland from Edmonton

  6. The road to Destruction City

  EIGHT 1. The Chilkoot

  2. Up the Golden Stairs

  3. One of everybody

  4. Death beneath the snows

  NINE 1. Rage in the sawpits

  2. The Lion of the Yukon

  3. The outlandish armada

  4. Split-Up City

  TEN 1. “Cheechako!”

  2. Carnival summer

  3. Champagne for breakfast

  4. Remember the Sabbath

  5. Graft and the Nugget

  ELEVEN 1. Soapy Smith takes over

  2. Alias Robin Hood

  3. The Committee of 101

  4. Dictator of Skagway

  5. Shoot-out at the Juneau dock

  6. No escape

  TWELVE 1. Gold, restless gold

  2. The San Francisco of the North

  3. The false fronts of Front Street

  4. Queens of dance-hall row

  5. Fortune’s wheels

  6. The last stampede

  7. Tales of conspicuous wealth

  8. Money to burn

  THIRTEEN 1. Finale

  2. The legacy of the gold rush

  3. River of ghosts

  Chronology

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Maps

  Gold Along the Yukon

  The Yukon River before the Gold Rush

  The Early Gold-fields

  The Creeks: 1896

  The Rich Ground: 1896–97

  The White Pass

  The Trails of Ninety-eight

  The Rich Man’s Route

  The All-American Route

  The Ashcroft and Stikine Trails

  The Edmonton Trails

  Overland Route: Edmonton to Peace River

  Overland Route: Peace River to Yukon

  The Water Route

  The Peel River Country

  The Chilkoot Pass

  Lake Bennett to Dawson

  Drawn by Henry Mindak

  To my father,

  who crossed his Chilkoot in 1898,

  and to my sons,

  who have yet to cross theirs

  Preface to the Revised Edition

  When the first through passenger train of the Canadian Pacific Railway set off for the new terminus of Vancouver in June of 1886, Canada ceased to be merely a geographical exp
ression. Bound together at last by John A. Macdonald’s “iron link,” the country could expect the speedy fulfilment of his national dream – the creation of a populous and prosperous North West from the empty prairie lands that had been given up a generation before by the Hudson’s Bay Company.

  But in the decade that followed, that vision was scarcely fulfilled. In the heady construction days of the early eighties, a western boom of unprecedented proportions seemed to be in the making; unhappily, over-optimism, wild speculation, drought, crop failure, and depression brought a swift decline in immigration figures. The bubble burst; and though the settlers continued to trickle in, the wave of newcomers that had been expected to follow the driving of the steel did not appear.

  Suddenly, in 1897, the news from the Klondike burst upon the continent and everything was changed. The transition was instantaneous – there is no other word for it. The CPR trains were jammed with passengers heading west to invade the North through Prince Albert, Edmonton, Ashcroft, or Vancouver. Within a year, the interior of British Columbia, the Peace River country, and the entire Mackenzie and Yukon watersheds were speckled with thousands of men and pack animals. For the first time, really, the Canadian north was seen to be something more than frozen wasteland: a chain of mineral discoveries, reaching into modern times, was touched off by the Klondike fever. Every western Canadian community from Winnipeg to Victoria was affected permanently by the boom. Vancouver doubled in size almost overnight; Edmonton’s population trebled. The depression, whose catalyst had been the silver panic of 1893, came to an end. It was replaced by an ebullient era of optimism and prosperity. New transcontinental railways were mooted and eventually constructed. A CPR contractor’s son, Clifford Sifton, who had just been named Minister of Immigration in the Laurier cabinet, launched his historic propaganda campaign to fill up the empty spaces on the plains. In the North West, a new boom was in the making.

  The Klondike story, then, forms a gaudy interlude between the two epic tales of post-Confederation western development — the building of the railway and the mass settlement of the plains. Since the author expects to tell the latter story in a subsequent volume, this expanded and revised edition of a fifteen-year-old work has been redesigned to conform to his two histories of the railway construction period, The National Dream and The Last Spike.

  Because the stampede to the Klondike straddled the international border, it provides a unique opportunity to compare the mores and customs of two neighbouring nationalities. Here was the most concentrated mass movement of American citizens onto Canadian soil in all our history. In the space of fewer than eighteen months, some fifty thousand men and women – brought up with the social, legal, and political traditions of the United States – found themselves living temporarily under a foreign flag, obeying, however reluctantly, foreign regulations, and encountering a foreign bureaucracy and officialdom. In Dawson, and indeed almost everywhere save on the all-Canadian trails, the Americans outnumbered the Canadians by at least five to one.

  It has often been said (usually by Americans) that there is no great difference between those who live south of the forty-ninth parallel and those of us who live on the Canadian side; but the Klondike experience supplies a good deal of evidence to support the theory that our history and our geography have helped to make us a distinct people – not better and not worse – but different in style, background, attitude, and temperament from our neighbours.

  Our national character has not been tempered in the crucible of violence, and our attitudes during the stampede underline this historic truth. In all the Americas ours is the only country that did not separate violently from its European parents. We remained loyal and obedient, safe and relatively dispassionate, and we welcomed to our shores those other loyalists who opted for the status quo. If this lack of revolutionary passion has given us a reasonably tranquil history, it has also, no doubt, contributed to our well-known lack of daring. It is almost a Canadian axiom that we would rather be safe than sorry; alas, we are sometimes sorry that we are so safe.

  Happily, we have had very little bloodshed in our history. Our rare insurrections have been fought on tiny stages blown up out of all proportion by the horrifying fact that they have occurred at all. Lynchings are foreign to us and so is gangsterism. The concept of barroom shoot-outs and duels in the sun have no part in our tradition either, possibly because we have had so few barrooms and so little sun. (It is awkward to reach efficiently for a six-gun while wearing a parka and two pairs of mittens.) When sudden, unreasoning violence does occur, as it did when Pierre Laporte was murdered in October, 1970, we tend to over-react. That was, after all, our first political assassination in more than a century and only the second in our history.

  If Canadians are a moderate people, as the whiskey advertisements used to say, it is also because of the presence at our back door of a vast and brooding wilderness. The Klondike was and is a part of a wilderness experience that we all share. For the Americans who rushed north in 1897 and 1898, it was a last frontier; for them there were no more wilderness worlds to conquer or even to know. But the frontier is with us still and it shapes us in its own fashion. The experience of naked rock and brooding forest, of slate-coloured lakes and empty valleys, of skeletal birches and gaunt pines, of the wolf’s haunting howl and the loon’s ghostly call is one that is still shared by a majority of Canadians but only a minority of Americans. There are few of us who do not live within a few hours’ drive of nature. It has bestowed upon us what one American observer, William Henry Chamberlain, has called “a sensation of tranquillity.” The North, still almost as empty as it was in the days before the great stampede, hangs over the country like an immense backdrop, providing, in the words of André Siegfried, “a window out onto the infinite.” A great Canadian editor, Arthur Irwin, once summed it up in a single sentence to a group of Americans. “Nearly every Canadian,” he said, “at some time in his life has felt a shiver of awe and loneliness which comes to a man when he stands alone in the face of untamed nature; and that is why we are a sober and essentially religious people.”

  We have been lucky with our history. The American frontier was wrested violently from the Indians and that violence continued until the frontier was tamed. Our own experience came later. The Hudson’s Bay Company, which held the hinterland in thrall for generations, and the Canadian Shield, which retarded the settlement of the plains in the days before the railroad, have been seen as drawbacks to progress. And yet this tardy exploitation of the North West is one of the reasons why we have no Wild West tradition. There was a time when we might have welcomed a more violent kind of frontier mythology, but that time is past.

  Every television addict knows that the two mythologies differ markedly. The Americans elected their lawmen – county sheriffs and town marshals – whose gun-slinging exploits helped forge their western legends. Summary justice by groups of vigilantes or hastily deputized posses was part of that legend. If the American frontier was not as violent as the media suggest, it was certainly violent compared with the Canadian frontier. There were no boot hills or hanging trees in our North West, and the idea that a community could take the law into its own hands or that a policeman might be elected by popular suffrage did not enter the heads of a people whose roots were stubbornly colonial and loyalist and whose heritage did not include anything as inflammatory as a Boston Tea Party. A variety of incidents on the Klondike trails bears this out, but the Klondike stampede was not the first occasion when the two traditions clashed on the soil of British North America.

  In 1858, a newspaper report reaching California of the discovery of gold on the Fraser River caused an almost immediate stampede of some thirty thousand Americans to what was then the sparsely populated Hudson’s Bay Company domain of New Caledonia. Almost instantly, all the institutions of the American mining camp were established on British soil: the gambling-houses, the sure-thing games, the dance halls and saloons, the crooked trading posts, and, above all, the quasi-legal institution of
the “miners’ meeting,” which, though it embodied all the grassroots democracy of a Swiss canton, had helped to give the California camps their reputation for lawlessness. All the ingredients, then, were present for frontier violence. Indian revolution was not beyond the realm of possibility. And there was the clear danger that the territory itself might come under American sovereignty, as Oregon had when Yankee settlers poured in.

  In the face of this threat, the British government moved with commendable celerity. Within a few weeks, New Caledonia had become a crown colony under James Douglas, Governor of Vancouver Island, and a force of soldiers and lawmakers had been dispatched to the Fraser gold-fields. British justice arrived in the person of that be-whiskered giant, Matthew Baillie Begbie, who proceeded to enforce the law toughly but fairly for Canadian and American alike. Judge Begbie, who thought that democracy was akin to anarchy, established a territorial council whose authoritarianism came under bitter criticism, but he undoubtedly prevented bloodshed among both Indians and whites, saved British Columbia for Canada, and established a pattern that was clearly followed by the Canadian government in 1897 and 1898.

  Begbie was to the Fraser and Cariboo gold rushes what Sam Steele was to the Klondike, and, indeed, there is a story told of him that is almost identical to one told of Steele during the great stampede.

  “Prisoner,” Begbie told an American charged with assault, “I understand you come from the other side of the line. We will not put up with your bullying here. The fine is one hundred dollars.”

  “That’s all right, Judge,” came the reply. “I’ve got that right here in my breeches pocket.”

  “And six months’ hard labour. Perhaps you have that in your other pocket!”

  The tale has become part of our authentic Canadian mythology, as any reader who compares it with the one on this page will realize.

  The second clash between the American and British traditions led to the formation of the North West Mounted Police and the founding of a Canadian frontier mythology that contrasted dramatically with the American. In the late 1860’s, a veteran Indian fighter and lawman named John J. Healy (whom the reader will encounter throughout this book) moved up from Montana into what is now southern Alberta to build Fort Whoop-Up, the best known of the American “whiskey forts.” Healy and his fellows were intent on making their fortunes by selling a hideous concoction of raw whiskey, red pepper, Jamaica ginger, and hot water to the Indians in exchange for furs. Small wonder that the forts – Robbers’ Roost, Fort Stand-Off, Whiskey Gap, and others – were built of heavy logs and defended by cannon: under the influence of such a devil’s brew, the Indians were perfectly prepared to massacre the men who sold it to them. It was the natives, however, who suffered a massacre. Some thirty-six Assiniboines were cruelly butchered in the Cypress Hills by Yankee frontiersmen who clung to the tradition that the only good redskin was a dead one.