Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush Read online

  To relieve his boredom, Jack went to the saloons for comradeship, noise, and laughter. There he found “the long bar and the array of bottles, the gambling games, the big stove, the weigher at the gold-scales, the musicians, the men and women.”

  In the saloons, Jack and the other miners drank, argued, hollered, whooped, danced, and gambled. He especially loved to talk—that is, when he wasn’t intently listening to the stories of the old-timers, the prospectors who had been in the Yukon long before the cheechakos arrived, the ones who really knew this country and who had traveled throughout the land. They were the sourdoughs, who made their bread not with baking powder (they had no baking powder) but with sourdough, hence the name. Jack had great respect for these old-timers.

  After George Carmack, Keish (Skookum Jim) and Káa Goox (Dawson Charlie) had made their first big gold discovery, or “strike,” and triggered the Stampede, the veteran miners who got in early soon came to be called Eldorado Kings. They pulled hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gold out of their claims.

  All around Dawson, the creeks were alive with activity—some people finding gold and some newcomers vainly looking for claims to work. And of course everyone was on the verge of making the next major strike! The place was electric with expectation.

  Some of the biggest money was made not in finding gold, but rather in selling food and goods to miners. Just after the Carmack strike of ’96, a French Canadian trader named Joseph Ladue saw a golden opportunity. While prospectors raced to Bonanza and nearby creeks to stake their mining claims, Ladue laid a different kind of claim to this mile of swampy land across the Klondike tributary along the Yukon. He staked out city lots, then applied for a town site patent on his claim, and it became the city of Dawson (named after Canadian geologist George Mercer Dawson, who explored the area in 1887). In a few years, some of those lots would be worth as much as twenty thousand dollars apiece (over half a million in today’s money). When the gold rush died down, Dawson continued to serve as the Yukon Territory’s capital from 1898 until 1952, after which the government moved to Whitehorse, 460 miles upriver.

  George Carmack, with folded hands, stands with a group in front of the Klondike Hotel, Dawson, 1898.

  (Yukon Archives, James Albert Johnson fonds, 82/341, #20)

  Dawson quickly grew overcrowded, and supplies became hard to get.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hegg 2277)

  Walking around town, Jack felt the deep-chilled autumn days, foggy and bleak. Yet sometimes, during an extended Arctic high, the air would clear and become breathlessly beautiful and dry. Jack felt happier than he’d ever been in his life, except of course when he was out on the water somewhere sailing a boat.

  Before Jack left San Francisco, all the newspapers had been predicting that people would starve in Dawson as the winter of ’97 closed in. Supplies had dwindled to oatmeal, cornmeal, evaporated milk, evaporated potato, butter in cans, and bacon. Steamboats with fresh goods from the Bering Sea two thousand miles downriver had halted on October 1 because of impenetrable river ice. Yukon authorities told anyone without outfits to leave the territory to help lessen the effects of starvation in the looming winter.

  Men who stayed in the country without enough supplies had it particularly rough. Horses had to be shot for food. There was even a story (a tall tale?) about one man in a lonely cabin who had died of starvation. His leg had been cut off by his ravenous partners and was boiling on the stove when help arrived.

  * * *

  PRICES IN DAWSON: 1897–1898

  (Multiply by 28 to get a sense of what these would cost today.)

  Candles: $1

  Yukon stoves: $40–$75

  Dogs: up to $400

  Horses: $3,400 per pair

  Moccasins, moose-hide, Native-made: $7 (formerly 50 cents per pair)

  Mittens, Native moose-hide: $6–$10 per pair

  Men’s deerskin parkas: $50–$100

  Firewood: $35–$75 per cord

  Copy of Shakespeare’s works: $50

  WAGES IN DAWSON

  Ordinary miners: $1–$1.50 an hour

  Foremen in mines: $15 and upward per 10-hour day

  Bartenders: $15 per day

  Bookkeepers: $17.50 per day

  Musicians: $17.50–$20 per day

  Services of man and two-horse team: $10 per hour

  Drivers: $300 per month, plus board

  Cooks in restaurants: $100 per week, plus board

  Waiters: $50 per week, plus board for men; $100 per month, plus board for women

  Barbers: 65 percent of receipts of chair, $15–$40 per day

  * * *

  A photojournalist named Tappan Adney, who was covering the story of the Stampede for Harper’s Weekly, came off the ice-choked river in October 1897 and described the town as nothing more than a few dwellings built on a swamp, an oozy muck in the summer, and hard, dry land in the winter. The north end of town terminated “in a narrow point at the base of a mountain conspicuous by reason of a light-gray patch of ‘slide’ upon its side bearing resemblance to a dressed moose-hide in shape and color, which has given to it the name of ‘Moose-hide’ or ‘Moose-skin’ Mountain.” Often referred to simply as the Slide, the mountain appeared, and still appears today, to have been cut away with a giant’s shovel. One day around Thanksgiving, a dance-hall performer threw a lighted kerosene lamp at a rival who was trying to steal her man. The wood building went up in flames, as did many of Dawson’s buildings.

  When Jack London and Tappan Adney landed at Dawson, with its three hundred cabins and stores, a small police post supported only a few policemen. A year later, by October 1898, in addition to a growing number of Mounties, the Yukon Field Force (the Canadian army presence in the Yukon) would send a detachment of fifty men to Dawson to help maintain order among the Stampeders.

  In November, the thermometer often dropped to −25°F. A few inches of snow lay on the ground and the roofs of the buildings. All kinds of restless newcomers were milling about the little bit of walkway along the storefronts. Cheechakos wore mackinaws and heavy cloth caps. Sourdoughs wore deerskin coats or parkas with lynx, sable, mink, or beaver caps and big fur-lined, moose-hide mittens.

  Men mostly, but an occasional woman, hurried every which way, with and without packs on their backs. A woman might be wearing a squirrel-skin coat in the dropping temperature.

  “Dogs,” Adney wrote, “both native and ‘outside,’ lay about the street under every one’s feet, sleeping—as if it was furthest from their minds that any one should hurt them—or else in strings of two to ten were dragging [on dog sleds] prodigious loads of boxes or sacks intended for the mines or for fuel, urged on by energetic dog-punchers.”

  Third Street, Dawson, Yukon Territory, ca. 1899

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hegg 858)

  And still thousands kept arriving. Many of them, including women and children, did not come with their own outfits. They had to buy food and equipment and would eventually deplete the town’s limited supplies. Adney says, “Excited men gathered in groups on the streets and in the saloons, and with gloomy faces discussed the situation. Some proposed seizing the warehouses and dividing the food evenly among all in camp.”

  THE BOND BROTHERS AND THEIR CABIN

  SOON AFTER ARRIVING in Dawson, in a hotel saloon, Jack met two mining engineers named Marshall and Louis Bond. The Bonds, also from California, had arrived in Dawson just before Jack. They’d bought a cabin on the north side of town near the new hospital. Yale-educated and wealthy, they were sons of a California judge and mining entrepreneur. Marshall and Louis Bond were good company for Jack. Like him, they were well-read. They liked to sit around talking about interesting subjects.

  Marshall later described meeting Jack in the Dominion Bar looking as unkempt as a hobo:

  * * *

  One of these men was of medium height with very square broad shoulders. His face was marked by a thick stubbly b
eard. A cap pulled down low on the forehead was the one touch necessary to complete the concealment of head and features, so that that part of the anatomy one looks to for an index of character was covered with beard and cap. He looked as tough and as uninviting to us as we doubtless looked to him.

  * * *

  The Bonds rented a space beside their cabin to Jack and his partners, who set up a modest tent, into which they fitted a small Yukon woodstove for heat and cooking. (The Yukon stove was one of the chief items in the gold rush. It was a lightweight portable stove consisting of a small metal box, sometimes half a metal barrel, divided into a firebox and an oven. It was easily taken apart and carried in pieces over the Chilkoot.)

  In the tent, Jack put down spruce boughs under his bedroll. The Bonds let him store food on the roof of their cabin so the roaming dogs wouldn’t get into it. Firewood was so expensive, Jack and others saved money by heading to the saloons to hang out for hours on end. But Jack also loved talking with the Bonds and their friends in their cabin near his tent. Marshall Bond said the effect of Jack’s words was hypnotic.

  Jack finally registered his claim on Henderson in the office of the gold commissioner on November 5, 1897. Jack’s plot—“more particularly described as placer mining Claim No. 54 on the Left Fork ascending Henderson Creek”—was two and a half miles, and fifty-four claims, above the fork where Robert Henderson had staked his discovery claim.

  To get a sense of how crowded the area got over the next year, consider this: In June of 1897, only eight hundred claims had been filed in Dawson. Seven months later, there were five thousand claims, and by September 1898, ten months after Jack filed his claim, there were a total of seventeen thousand registered claims.

  St. Mary’s Hospital. In the detail, you can see a cabin (with ladder) and with a “cache” side cabin, and tent pitched nearby. This may have been in the actual place where Jack pitched his tent.

  (Jim Robb Collection, Yukon, Canada)

  This is the actual form Jack filled out to file his claim in Dawson in November 1897.

  (Yukon Archives, GOV 387, #2080)

  LINGERING IN DAWSON

  JACK STAYED IN DAWSON for forty-seven days before returning to Split-Up Island. That autumn, the cold weather mixed with unusually mild temperatures until late November, when the temperature finally plummeted to −60°F. So the Yukon took longer than expected to freeze solid enough for safe river travel. All through October, the rim ice had been thickening, and the Yukon carried a run of mush ice. When the Yukon River first begins to freeze, it is impassable for six to seven weeks—the ice is too slushy and soft to travel on and too thick for a boat to pass through. All river travel comes to a halt.

  November got very cold in Jack’s meager tent. In The Klondike Stampede, Tappan Adney describes living in Dawson a few miles from Jack:

  * * *

  During all this time we lived in the tent, which was strung by a rope between two trees. The thermometer fell to 39° below zero, but it was astonishing how warm a stove made the tent; as soon as the fire went down, however, it was as cold as out-of-doors. Between us we had thirteen pairs of blankets, thin and thick, and in the midst of these we slept; even then, with all our clothes on and lying close together, we were never really warm; but in time we grew accustomed to what we could not avoid. A great annoyance was caused by the steam of our breath and from our bodies condensing and freezing, until the white frost about our heads looked like that around a bear’s den in winter. The breakfast fire would quickly melt the frost; but we never dried out.

  * * *

  While Jack waited for the Yukon to freeze, he kept returning to the saloons, dance halls, and gambling joints, where he soaked up the stories and the sights and the sounds of the gold rush. Jack had a powerful memory, and these details would later come to life in his writing.

  Soon to be called the Paris of the North, Dawson had six thousand inhabitants that fall. By the time Jack left the Klondike the following summer, the population had grown to thirty thousand. President William McKinley had to organize relief for those starving in the Yukon.

  Jack loved to listen to the sourdoughs in Dawson saloons.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hegg 3143)

  An article appeared in the Spokane, Washington, Daily Chronicle:

  * * *

  RELIEF WILL BE SENT TO KLONDIKE

  PRESIDENT MCKINLEY WILL URGE IMMEDIATE ACTION FOR RELIEF.

  All the Members Anxious to Send Aid to the Gold Seekers.

  Washington, Nov. 30.—The cabinet today considered the subject of sending relief to the people of the Klondike. The president has received a telegram from the Portland, Oregon, chamber of commerce, stating there was danger of destitution and suffering in the Klondike and offering to supply the necessary food for relief if the government would undertake the transportation.… No attempt will be made to go up the Yukon, as the ice has closed progress in that direction. Relief supplies will have to be sent over the passes.

  * * *

  While some began to feel the deep pangs of hunger, Jack walked around town observing all the many characters who had gathered in this boom city.

  BIG ALEC McDONALD, KING OF THE KLONDIKE

  ONE NOTABLE PERSONALITY Jack is certain to have met in town was Big Alec McDonald.

  All the cheechakos drooled at the success story of Big Alec. A common statement about the Stampede is that of the forty thousand who reached Dawson, only a few hundred got rich. The luckiest of all might have been Alexander McDonald, a lumbering, almost clumsy man from Nova Scotia, Canada. Big Moose, as they called him, was a shrewd businessman. He’d climbed over the Chilkoot in 1896 and settled in Dawson. One of the claims he bought was Claim 30 on Eldorado Creek. He paid a Russian immigrant a sack of flour and a side of bacon for a claim that would soon yield more gold than almost any claim in the gold rush.

  Big Alec rarely mined his claims himself, but rather leased them out to miners who were promised a split of whatever they discovered. He used the profits from claim 30 to buy other claims. By the end of 1897, he owned twenty-eight claims on many different creeks. In 1898 some said he was worth ten million dollars. He kept a suite at his own hotel—the McDonald Hotel. Visitors dipped their hands into a box of gold nuggets. He told them to grab just the big ones!

  Marshall Bond wrote:

  * * *

  There is scarcely what you would term a trained businessman in the country, one of ability and comprehension of the situation. The most prominent figure is Alexander McDonald, a laborer of Scotch extraction. He bought a claim on Eldorado last year … and made a lot of money. He is a terrific plunger and buys right and left, often borrowing money at ten percent a month. He owed $150,000 some time ago, and his creditors thought they had him. In one day he took $30,000 out of the ground and saved himself. It is hard to tell what he is worth, perhaps millions, perhaps nothing.

  * * *

  New York Herald reporter John D. McGillivray wrote about Alexander McDonald and the power of the few storeowners who had set up shop:

  * * *

  There is in Dawson no newspaper, no bank, no such thing as an insurance office, no shops except those of the two trading companies, where the clerks are to be bowed down to.

  They are most insolent in their manner of charging 3,000 per cent profit for a candle. One in Dawson must consider that he is being done a great favor to be allowed to purchase anything, and it is a curious sight to see “Alex” McDonald, worth several millions, endeavoring to be very polite to a puny clerk from whom he wishes to buy a few pounds of nails for one of his hundred cabins.

  * * *

  Big Alec tended to rub his chin slowly when new propositions were pitched to him. He would often say “no, no, no,” and then he’d say “all right” to the claims he thought worth pursuing. Truly he was the King of the Klondike, one of the so-called Eldorado Kings, but after touring Europe and marrying a young woman in England, he squandered his money and died penniless,
alone in a cabin on a small creek. He had spent his fortune and had given away much of it to the church.

  THE DOGS OF DAWSON

  IN DAWSON, THE BOND BROTHERS had two dogs named Pat and Jack, which they’d acquired in Seattle on their way north. They noticed how London didn’t fawn over the dogs but rather let them come to him. He was a dog person, and he was particularly fond of the one called Jack, a cross between a Saint Bernard and a German shepherd. He had character. He was confident and courageous and immensely strong. He was intelligent and had a good nature. But, Jack knew, like any animal who might be treated badly, there was always the possibility the wolf in him could surface if he was pushed too far. Later he would become the model for Buck in London’s most famous novel, The Call of the Wild.

  Getting mail in and out of Dawson by dog team after the snows fell and the rivers froze solid was essential to the workings of the Canadian government, and London paid particular attention to the hard work of delivering the mail. Strong, good dogs like Jack would be made leader of an official dog team working back and forth between Dawson and the coast, a round-trip of more than a thousand miles that foiled many Stampeders.