Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush Read online

  Marshall and Louis Bond’s cabin in Dawson. The dog on the left is Jack, the model for Buck in The Call of the Wild.

  (Special Collections and Archives, Middlebury College)

  The dogs traveled the route regularly. Twenty-five- to thirty-day trips were considered a good time for a dog team from Dawson out to Dyea in early winter; eighteen days to return in spring. The fastest time was ten days.

  Jack met a man named “Klondike” Mike Mahoney, who ran dog teams hauling freight and mail from the Alaskan coast all the way to Dawson and back. Jack asked Mike so many questions about his job that Mike later remembered that of the seventy people in the Split-Up camp that Christmas, one young man with great curiosity had sat for hours picking his brain. Later, that information found its way into Jack’s Klondike stories.

  In fact, Dawson, where so many dogs ran around the waterfront streets, was the ideal setting for Jack to observe how the animals were cared for by some and mistreated by others. He also noticed that some were half-breeds. Wild wolves tended to be shy of humans. But many of the Dawson dogs were hybrids: part wolf, part dog. Jack watched the ravenous dogs in Dawson, more than fifteen hundred of them, roam in fierce gangs around town. Many more were used out in the mines on the creeks. They traveled in packs of up to twenty, and when they saw a single dog, they chased it. Dogfights broke out all over town.

  Jack found plenty of organized dogfights in Dawson, too. One such scene found its way into his novel White Fang, where the hybrid “fighting wolf” by that name finally meets his match on the outskirts of town, far enough into the woods that the Mounties wouldn’t find the illegal fight. In White Fang’s deadly tangle with the bulldog Cherokee, White Fang, who has successfully beaten every dog until now, is not able to counterattack with his usual wolf snip and back pull. The smaller Cherokee gets White Fang by the throat and nearly strangles him to death while White Fang’s new and evil owner, Beauty Smith, kicks White Fang to get him angry so he’ll fight harder.

  * * *

  It began to look as though the battle were over. The backers of Cherokee waxed jubilant and offered ridiculous odds. White Fang’s backers were correspondingly depressed, and refused bets of ten to one and twenty to one, though one man was rash enough to close a wager of fifty to one. This man was Beauty Smith. He took a step into the ring and pointed his finger at White Fang. Then he began to laugh derisively and scornfully. This produced the desired effect. White Fang went wild with rage. He called up his reserves of strength and gained his feet. As he struggled around the ring, the fifty pounds of his foe ever dragging on his throat, his anger passed on into panic.

  * * *

  * * *

  OUTSIDE OF TOWN, in the low cranberry bushes that would turn red the next August, Jack came across bear tracks twelve inches long and eight inches wide. Once, roaming the surrounding hills, he confronted a timber wolf, face-to-face. Jack didn’t see the animal, spectral gray in the frozen half-light, until he was only thirty yards away. Yukon wolves are the largest in the world. This wolf stood firm and confident near Bonanza Creek. Man and beast stared at one another for what seemed to Jack like half a minute. Then, on its own quiet terms, the timber wolf, confidently, ever cautiously, stepped backward a few paces, its yellow eyes still fixed on Jack. Slowly it turned its head to the creek and sauntered down into the gully.

  Wolves are social and highly intelligent creatures. They embody the spirit of free and unspoiled wilderness. Jack’s nickname would become “Wolf.” And his collection of published stories, The Son of the Wolf, would be his first of many Klondike tales.

  PART FOUR

  DECEMBER 3, 1897–LATE JANUARY 1898

  HENDERSON AND THE CREEKS

  I wanted the gold, and I sought it;

  I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.

  Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;

  I hurled my youth into a grave.

  I wanted the gold, and I got it—

  Came out with a fortune last fall,—

  Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,

  And somehow the gold isn’t all.

  No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)

  It’s the cussedest land that I know,

  From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it,

  To the deep, deathlike valleys below.

  Some say God was tired when He made it;

  Some say it’s a fine land to shun;

  Maybe: but there’s some as would trade it

  For no land on earth—and I’m one.

  From “The Spell of the Yukon,”

  by Robert Service

  HENDERSON CREEK

  WITH HIS CLAIM LEGALLY FILED, Jack had to do some mining. Soon he’d begin the backbreaking work of digging a shaft into the frozen ground of his claim.

  On December 3, the ice on the river was safe for travel. After so many weeks of muddy streets, saloons, and dance halls, Jack and Fred Thompson finally put Dawson behind them. Yet it felt a little lonely to leave the company of the Bond brothers and their educated friends and all the excitement of the town. Heading out to a cabin seventy-five miles away, Jack would face the long and bitter cold of the fast-approaching dark winter.

  He left town on snowshoes. When he’d first tried snowshoeing, he grew exhausted at the end of a hundred yards. He learned quickly that walking in deep snow with snowshoes was hard work: “At every step the great webbed shoe sinks till the snow is level with the knee. Then up, straight up, the deviation of a fraction of an inch being a certain precursor of disaster, the snowshoe must be lifted till the surface is cleared; then forward, down, and the other foot is raised perpendicularly for the matter of half a yard.”

  They camped for four days on the river until they found their island silent and white. “No animals nor humming insects broke the silence. No birds flew in the chill air.… The world slept, and it was like the sleep of death.” The river was covered now in three feet of ice with three feet of snow above that.

  As the gloomy light of the shorter Arctic days dwindled to just a few hours, from his cabin Jack watched the men hiking from the Chilkoot to Dawson. They etched a thin dark line on the great white expanse. The Stewart camp just happened to be located at a kind of Stampeder crossroads, with miners constantly moving to and from Dawson. Jack liked meeting the prospectors as they traveled through.

  At Split-Up, Jack met a miner named Emil Jensen. From the moment Emil landed his boat in the swift, icy current, the two men became best pals. They shared books and laughter through the cold winter. Emil remembered first meeting Jack, that “curly-haired, blue-eyed boy … little more than a lad,” yet with a “face illumined with a smile that never grew cold.”

  Jack and his partners immediately talked up Henderson Creek. Emil wrote later, “Many others joined in our conversation, all singing the praises of Henderson. All were Henderson mad. Rich? Why, a shovel thrust into the creek-bed—where the swift water kept the ice at bay—had brought up a dollar’s worth of shining dust in the bit of gravel clinging to its blade.… Was it Fate, or was it the usual stampede madness—gold madness? Oh, of course we all fell for it.”

  Emil and his own partners decided to stay with Jack. They took up residence in an empty shack just behind Jack’s cabin in order to explore Henderson Creek.

  The owner of Claim 54, Jack now gathered his gear and made his way thirteen miles up Henderson Creek.

  CABIN LIVING

  FOUR MILES BEYOND his claim, Jack helped build a small cabin only twenty feet from Emil Jensen’s shack, then both started the grueling work of mining in winter. Emil said later, “Like the others, he toiled, sweated and flung the dirt about with an enthusiasm that never diminished.”

  Although Jack wasn’t keeping a journal at the time, he later wrote that a miner’s cabin was no bigger than ten by twelve feet, snug and heated by a roaring Yukon stove. It felt “more homelike to him than any house he had ever lived in.” A few bunks, a table, and the stove took up most of the room, “but every inch
of space was utilized. Revolvers, rifles, hunting-knives, belts and clothes, hung from three of the walls in picturesque confusion; the remaining [wall] … being hidden by a set of shelves, which held all their cooking utensils.”

  Dick North and friends discovered Jack’s cabin on Henderson in 1965 and salvaged its parts so replicas could be constructed in Dawson and California.

  (Photo: Peter Lourie)

  Life in a small cabin on an isolated creek was not easy. Tensions grew and tempers blazed. It was difficult to cook in a crowded little cabin. There was hardly enough space for three or four men to eat, sleep, lounge, smoke, play cards, and entertain visitors, and all their personal gear was stored anywhere they could find a spot. When you came in from the outside, you used the whisk broom hanging at the entrance to brush the snow off your clothes before you settled into cabin life.

  The miners never made their beds—blankets on pine needles for a mattress or caribou skins placed on spruce-pole bunks—and their stuff was flung all over the place. The Yukon stove in one corner of the cabin radiated all the heat they needed, even in temperatures of −60°F outside. In the morning, the cook rose to rekindle the fire that had dwindled in the night, but he also had to go out and fetch water and wood. Tarwater was no longer part of the group, so everyone took turns cooking.

  The cabin had a dirt floor. They did a lot of carpentry work inside, and the chips and shavings were never swept up because they helped insulate against the cold. Jack jokingly wrote, “Whenever he [the cook] kindles a fire he uses a couple of handfuls of the floor. However, when the deposit becomes so deep that his head is knocking against the roof, he seizes a shovel and removes a foot or so of it.”

  The reconstruction of Jack’s Henderson cabin shows what it might have looked like.

  (Photo: Peter Lourie)

  Miners in a cabin eating dinner by candlelight.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hegg 3090)

  At night they played checkers and poker, and sometimes chess. Sitting at a hand-hewn spruce table, the men had a hard time drawing cards across the rough surface.

  Heat was distributed unevenly in the cabin, too. While the men sat in their undershirts, their faces sweaty from the heat of the roaring stove, the floor was so cold that they wore both wool socks and moccasins. Just eight feet away, on a low shelf by the door, chunks of moose meat and bacon were frozen solid.

  When they rested for days in the cabin after coming off the trail or after working hard in the mine shafts, each had to take his turn as cook. The men often teased Jack when it was his turn. They complained about how he boiled the coffee or fried the bacon. They complained about how he baked the ever-present sourdough bread (Everyone made sourdough differently, and it was never made the same way twice).

  Jack humorously described how “fickle” sourdough bread could be:

  * * *

  You cannot depend upon it. Still, it is the simplest thing in the world. Make a batter and place it near the stove (that it may not freeze) till it ferments or sours. Then mix the dough with it, and sweeten with soda to taste—of course replenishing the batter for next time. There it is. Was there ever anything simpler? But, oh, the tribulations of the cook! It is never twice the same. If the batter could only be placed away in an equable temperature, all well and good. If one’s comrades did not interfere, much vexation of spirit might be avoided. But this cannot be; for Tom fires up the stove till the cabin is become like the hot-room of a Turkish bath; Dick forgets all about the fire till the place is a refrigerator; then along comes Harry and shoves the sour-dough bucket right against the stove to make way for the drying of his mittens. Now heat is a most potent factor in accelerating the fermentation of flour and water, and hence the unfortunate cook is constantly in disgrace with Tom, Dick, and Harry. Last week his bread was yellow from a plethora of soda; this week it is sour from a prudent lack of the same; and next week—ah, who can tell save the god of the fire-box?

  * * *

  Jack made doughnuts fried in bacon grease—the greasier the better. For the men heading out on the trail, foods made with maximum amounts of sugar and grease didn’t freeze as easily in severe temperatures, and these doughnuts were easy to carry in pockets. When sugar supplies ran short, Jack just added more bacon grease.

  Lack of sugar often made the men tense and grumpy. “Naturally, coffee, and mush, and dried fruit, and rice, eaten without sugar, do not taste exactly as they should.” To sweeten the rice, Jack might add some dried fruit. He had to improvise to make bland food taste interesting.

  Bacon grease, the ever-present ingredient, was also used to make cabin windows. A sheet of writing paper, “rubbed thoroughly with bacon grease, becomes transparent, sheds water when it thaws, and keeps the cold out and the heat in. In cold weather the ice will form upon the inside of it to the thickness of sometimes two or three inches.”

  Bacon grease could be used to make candles as well: “When the candles give out, the cook fills a sardine-can with bacon grease, manufactures a wick out of the carpenter’s sail-twine, and behold! the slush-lamp stands complete.”

  Before the men would head out to their claims on Henderson, the cook made “several gallons of beans in the company of numerous chunks of salt pork and much bacon grease. This mess he then molds into blocks of convenient size and places on the roof, where it freezes into bricks in a couple of hours. Thus the men, after a weary day’s travel, have but to chop off chunks with an axe and thaw out in the frying-pan.”

  Jack and his partners were always on the lookout for new ingredients other miners might trade. They took great interest in chili peppers and spices to vary the taste of their endlessly tedious menu of bacon, beans, and bread. “Variety in the grub is as welcome to the men as nuggets,” wrote Jack. “When, after eating dried peaches for months, the cook trades a few cupfuls of the same for apricots, the future at once takes on a more roseate hue. Even a change in the brand of bacon will revivify blasted faith in the country.”

  WORKING THE MINE

  TRAVELING IN THE WINTER was rough going in brutal Arctic conditions. In the next five months, Jack would break trail many times to hunt or collect firewood, or visit his Henderson claim from his Stewart cabin. He often hunted with a friend named Elam Harnish (he later gave this name to one of his characters in his novel Burning Daylight). But winter mining was usually a solitary business.

  Klondike gold is “placer” gold (the a is pronounced as in the word flat)—loose gold lying in gravel. You take the gravel and wash it, which removes everything else, leaving the heavier gold behind. Winter is a good time to build the shafts and tunnels because the permafrost (soil that is always frozen in the cold regions of the world) keeps the water from flooding the shafts.

  The frozen ground had to be thawed with fires, a few feet at a time, to work a four-by-six-foot shaft down into the permafrost. Poor ventilation in the shaft made for dangerous work. If a miner was lucky, he’d get down to bedrock and find a “pay streak,” a vein of gold that could be several feet wide, full of gold dust and maybe nuggets, the remains of ancient streams. It might take two months to dig a shaft all the way down to bedrock, a distance of maybe twenty feet.

  The miner built a windlass at the top of the crib and lowered a bucket from a rope to hoist the dirt up and out.

  (Photo: Peter Lourie)

  Jack started a shaft on his claim. He made many fires in the deepening shaft and dug out the loosening gravel. This was called crib mining because of the crib of logs he built as he dug down to create the main shaft.

  Crib mining was time-consuming. You had to be strong to do the work. Buckets of frozen earth called pay dirt were continuously dragged up and piled into mounds that would be panned in the spring when the ice melted in the streams and the water ran again. Sometimes in winter the men panned the pay dirt in the warmth of their cabins.

  Gold miners at work hauling muck to the surface from the shaft. Fire was used to loosen the frozen gravel and make it poss
ible to dig the shaft.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW 28771z)

  When the shaft got too deep to shovel the muck out, the miner built a windlass at the top of the crib and lowered a bucket from a rope to hoist the dirt up and out.

  Miners sift gold in a cabin on Eldorado Creek, Yukon Territory, 1898.

  (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, A. Curtis 46162)

  Day after day, Jack built new fires against the wall of earth to thaw the ice holding the gravel. Those fires took a lot of wood, maybe thirty cords of pine, spruce, and birch. This would usually have been cut the summer before, but Jack didn’t have that amount stored up, so it took him four hours a day to collect enough wood. Six hours of burning would thaw only eight inches of frozen muck.

  Jack kept shoveling out loose dirt and building new fires, wearing himself out with round-the-clock labor.

  * * *

  It was a hard and simple life. Breakfast over, and they were at work by the first gray light; and when night descended, they did their cooking and camp-chores, smoked and yarned for a while, then rolled up in their sleeping-robes, and slept while the aurora borealis flamed overhead and the stars leaped and danced in the great cold.

  * * *

  During Jack’s Arctic winter, the temperatures hovered from −40°F to −50°F for three months with no glimpse of the sun. Jack went through one candle a day down in the shaft, and each one cost as much as $1.50.

  * * *

  TO MOST MINERS, the world of the Arctic winter was deathly depressing, but Jack countered the bleakness through his observations, which he used so well in later stories. Here, in Burning Daylight, he describes the weak return of the sun after late January: