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After the Gold Rush
Prologue

The river had been rising steadily during the three weeks since breakup and the headwater lakes were filling with melt. Snow had left the lowlands in early May, but the ice lingered on the lakes until early June. Flowers carpeted the valley floors and new green foliage climbed hillsides up to the rockfalls beneath the granite faces of the mountains. And now we were on the swift river, drifting among rooted timber, sticks and debris swept up from the banks, silently passing trees leaning awkwardly out over the river, their roots undercut by the high water. And we watched sections of steep banks, also undercut, avalanche into the muddy, upwelling water.

During the two endless days of June we spent at Fort Selkirk, the water level dropped enough to expose the bottom of the dirt ramp that leads from the river to the high bank, and we no longer saw the trees and debris rushing past. Across the Pelly River from Fort Selkirk where the Pelly River silently enters the Yukon we saw a long sandbar emerge from the water like a living thing that alternately grows and disappears with the cycle of seasons.

We reloaded our boats and moved northward with the current toward Dawson City. We saw other people at the occasional highway crossing or major river intersection, but it was too early for other travelers who each year form a patchy parade during July and August. We had the river virtually to ourselves.

There was nothing unique about our journey on the Yukon, even though we liked to think so. River travel from Whitehorse to Dawson City and beyond into Alaska was no more uncommon for Yukoners than traveling across the American West on Route 66 during the first half of this century. Before the steamboats were the Indians in their moose-skin boats, canoes and rafts, then the fur traders and trappers, the prospectors and the missionaries. After the prospectors began finding gold in the tributaries, the river traffic slowly increased until the big strike of 1896 on a small stream that feeds into the Klondike River near its confluence with the Yukon.
Then the paddlewheel flotilla came, and the White Pass & Yukon Route's narrow-gauge tracks were laid over the windy Coast Range from Skagway to the downstream end of the treacherous Miles Canyon and White Horse Rapids, establishing the Yukon River as the transportation corridor from Whitehorse to the Bering Sea.

During the winter months the White Pass & Yukon Route operated a stage line that followed the river to Dawson City, and in the spring of each year for more than fifty years all travel ceased during that awkward time when the snow was gone and the ice too thin for travel. When the ice at last cleared, they launched an armada of steamboats, canoes, rowboats, skin boats and rafts called "float-me-downs" that they sold for lumber in Dawson City. Those going upstream had two choices: they either rode the steamboats that had wintered in sloughs near Dawson City, or they tracked their boats along the bank, unable to paddle against the swift current.

World War II altered the historic pattern. When the Alaska Highway was built across the bottom of the Yukon Territory in the early 1940s, spur highways soon stretched lines across the maps, heading for towns in the wilderness that few outside the Yukon had heard of and bringing others into existence. When the highway from Whitehorse to Dawson City was completed, it contained one feature that stated more bluntly than any government report could that the riverboat era was over and consigned to history. The highway engineers designed a bridge to cross the river at Carmacks too low for the high-hatted steamboats to go under. When the last steamboat on the river, the Keno, was taken downstream to be beached as a museum in Dawson City, the crew had to dismantle the top deck to clear the Carmacks bridge.

The highway also cleared the river of population. The woodcutters' camps strung at about 30-mile intervals had been abandoned a few years earlier when the supply of good spruce
wood was depleted and the steamboats converted to oil. Now the towns disappeared too. Only a few trappers remained with the handful of privacy lovers on the 460-mile stretch between Whitehorse and Dawson City. Steamboat freight rates were so high that it was impractical to remove all household goods from cabins, unless they were moving downstream and could haul their belongings in their own boats. For years afterward river travelers could stop in cabins and find them equipped with cooking utensils and china, bedding, furniture, and such amenities as curtains over the windows and books on the shelves. But over the years the houses were gradually stripped of the furniture, and some caved in from the weight of snow. Others were weather-ravaged after windows were broken and doors left open by vandals in the wilderness.

We began, then, where most of the Yukon's history began: in the vast chain of lakes that form the headwater system in Northern British Columbia. True, there were entries from the interior of Canada by Hudson's Bay traders, and others went up the Yukon from its estuary in the Bering Sea. And during the two decades of prospecting that preceded the Klondike strike, men had wintered over at Circle City and Fortymile and Fort Reliance. But the Yukon as we know it today was settled by a south-to-north migration that began in Southern Canada and
Northwestern United States, arriving by boat at Skagway, Alaska, and then over the Coast Range to Lake Bennett via the White and Chilkoot passes.

During the Klondike gold rush of 1897-98 there were several thousand-about 30,000 is the most educated guess-who survived the winter on the passes and built boats on the shores of Lake Lindeman and Lake Bennett. From there they launched more than 7,000 boats in late May 1898 and headed downstream to the Klondike.

We hiked the 32-mile Chilkoot Trail and saw the evidence of that mad winter: the abandoned townsites of Canyon City, Sheep Camp, Lindeman City; the cookstoves, boots, horse shoes and harness; the steam engine that powered an 11-mile long aerial tramway and the tripod-shaped supports for the tramway cable; the cemeteries at Lindeman City and Bennett; the trees cut when the snow was or 6 feet deep, leaving stumps nearly head-high; the tent sites dug out along the sand-bank on the shore of Lake Bennett. The more evidence we saw of the special form of madness that accompanied the gold rush, the more preposterous the whole episode became. Even in his most cynical moments, Nathaniel West could not have invented a more appalling story than the Klondike. It was an event only a Dante of the North could conjure up to frighten responsible men and women into staying home in more temperate zones.

We were there in June, when the temperature ranges from 50 to 90 degrees above zero, and we slept most nights with our sleeping bags open. Those people who left so much evidence of their passing were there when the temperature dropped to 20 or 30 degrees below zero with wind that brought the chill factor down to 100 degrees below and when, in the words of one diarist, "the snow fell sideways." They suffered and died from scurvy; epidemics of spinal meningitis swept the trails. There were murders, public whippings, acts of courage and cowardice. There were avalanches that killed more than sixty stampeders in one day. And there were brilliant, warm days when the summit was packed with humanity, each person carrying load after load over the summit from Alaska into Canada, past the Mounties who lived in the blizzard-swept summit notch to collect duties and to require that each person bring 1,150 pounds of food into the country, a year's supply.

We hiked the trail, carrying no more than 40 pounds each, insulting the memory of those stampeders by having lightweight tents, comfortable hiking boots, freeze-dried food, balanced meals and the option of calling off the whole trip and flying home. We climbed over the summit in a whiteout so absolute that we felt our way over the boulders and could not see rocks bouncing down toward us when those above shouted warnings. We descended into Canada past the high sterile lakes that are free of ice less than two months a year, through the treeless alpine meadows and over perennial snowbanks, and dropped down a switchback trail into the trees again, then down another steep hill to the shore of Lake Lindeman. There we pitched horseshoes that had been left behind three quarters of a century earlier and found broken bottles, cigarette cases, belt buckles, and bones from moose, caribou, or horse steaks.

Thus we came to the river: well fed, our clothing lightweight and warm, our health in no danger of incipient scurvy. We were so far removed from the Klondike gold rush in both time and science that empathy was virtually impossible. Only geography remained the same.

Geography is the only constant in the Yukon Territory, but nearly every book written about the Yukon concerns only its history; most of those are addressed to the gold rush. Strangely, only an occasional story has appeared about the steamboat era, and little of interest has been written about other aspects of the Yukon-the Indians, the trappers, the vast wilderness: the Yukon today.

I won't presume to tell you this is a book about the entire Yukon Territory, nor is it an attempt to bring the Yukon's history up to date; that is a job for a professional historian with a research staff. But it is impossible to speak of the Yukon today without some reference to its past, and historical digressions must crop up from time to time.

In an era when Canadians are seeking a strong national identity, and when there are occasional anti-American outbursts, I cannot remember a single occasion when anyone treated me as an outsider. They accepted me, as they will anyone, on my own merits. Home addresses are of no importance in the Yukon. In return for this courtesy, I do not intend this to be a book about a foreign country. I do not understand American politics any better than I understand Canadian politics. I do not have solutions to our native problems and I cannot and will not offer solutions to those of Canada.

Rather, I am simply interested in the "nouns" of the place-the people, places and events with which I have become familiar.