Jack London and the Klondike Gold Rush Page 8

  * * *

  It was a dead world, and furthermore, a gray world. The weather was sharp and clear; there was no moisture in the atmosphere, no fog nor haze; yet the sky was a gray pall. The reason for this was that, though there was no cloud in the sky to dim the brightness of day, there was no sun to give brightness. Far to the south the sun climbed steadily to meridian, but between it and the frozen Yukon intervened the bulge of the earth. The Yukon lay in a night shadow, and the day itself was in reality a long twilight. At a quarter before twelve, where a wide bend of the river gave a long vista south, the sun showed its upper rim above the sky-line. But it did not rise perpendicularly. Instead, it rose on a slant, so that by high noon it had barely lifted its lower rim clear of the horizon. It was a dim, wan sun. There was no heat to its rays, and a man could gaze squarely into the full orb of it without hurt to his eyes. No sooner had it reached meridian than it began its slant back beneath the horizon, and at quarter past twelve the earth threw its shadow again over the land.

  * * *

  There were times of no meat through that winter, yet one of the partners was always out looking for moose, wild geese, ducks, and muskrats. One day it would be Sloper, another day Jensen.

  Jack himself was not a hunter. He didn’t like to kill animals. Walking in the woods, Jack could smell a moose long before he saw the great hulk of the animal grazing in the snow-covered swampy brush.

  Back in the small Henderson cabin, Jack got enough light from the makeshift candle, a pitcher of bacon grease with rags in it, to read one of the few books he’d lugged over the Chilkoot. At night when he went visiting in nearby cabins, he always brought his own candle. Another unwritten law of the north was that books were shared. Jack lent out his books.

  Emil Jensen said, “Few of us had brought more than one [book], although some had brought as many as three. It was from Jack I borrowed my first book. Anywhere else, I would have passed that thing up without a second thought, but in the Yukon, a book was a book.”

  London took Jensen on as his own personal student of literature. “Like the master he was, even in those earlier days he set about quietly to convert me to his way of thinking,” wrote Emil. Jack inspired his friend to read Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and he was always quoting lines from poems. He then introduced Emil to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Kipling’s “The Rhyme of the Three Sealers.”

  Cabin living in the Arctic winter was very good for a writer like Jack. Not only had he always taken a keen interest in people and their stories, now he could observe a variety of men up close. All personal weaknesses sooner or later showed up in the tight quarters of the frozen wilderness. Jack saw the men angry and lonely and starving and sick; he saw them happy and social; and he especially saw them in conflict with one another. There were no secrets in the prospecting camps.

  FRIENDSHIPS IN THE COLD

  * * *

  “But no, nothing moved; the Silence crowded in, and the Fear of the North laid icy fingers on his heart.”

  —“In a Far Country”

  “He travels fastest who travels alone … but not after the frost has dropped below zero fifty degrees or more.”

  —Yukon Code

  * * *

  AS THE MINERS returned one by one from Henderson, they clustered in their cabins on Split-Up. Together, they provided the social life that would get them through the long Arctic winter and its incredible silence. Emil Jensen said, “Naturally there was frequent visiting, much talk and careful scheming before we again scattered, some being in favor of one locality and some another. Meanwhile the London cabin was always the centre of attraction. Situated as it was on the bank of the Yukon, all men coming over the long trail must pass it, and the smoke rising white and lazily from its chimney was to all a temptation, for it spoke warmth, and rest, and comfort.”

  Emil Jensen’s friendship was very important to Jack, and the two men seemed to deeply understand and respect each other. Jack’s mining companion would form the model for an important character appearing in numerous Klondike stories and known as the Malemute Kid.

  Emil Jensen continued:

  * * *

  Close companionship leaves but little room for secrets. As in a ship on the high seas so it was here in the northern wilderness, all that is in a man must out—the bad with the good, and it is only a question of time when one’s innermost thoughts become common property, shared freely with his intimates. And yet nine months constant association with Jack London did not shake the opinion I had formed of his character on that first meeting when he greeted me on the river-bank with the cheery “How do you do? Where from, Friend?” Through the long months he was always the same, a real friend, helpful, kind and inspiring, always the sunny smile upon his lips.

  * * *

  As well as listening to stories, or telling them, Jack loved a good argument. He would often sit on the edge of his bunk, rolling a cigarette. He smoked continuously and had stains on his fingers from nicotine. One night, Goodman was cooking and Sloper was at work on some carpentry when a man named Bert Hargrave walked in. Jack interrupted the conversation in the cabin to welcome the newcomer with great warm hospitality and a huge smile that put the newcomer at ease.

  Hargrave described the young lad’s smile “as winsome as a woman’s; his brown hair, wavy, almost curly; his clean-cut features and his wonderful eyes.… But gentle-hearted and laughter-loving as he was, I have heard him at times—especially when he dwelt upon the unheeded tragedies of industrialism—utter words that stung like a lash.”

  Some days Jack traveled along the Yukon by dogsled through a frozen landscape. He later described this in Burning Daylight as

  * * *

  a world of silence and immobility. Nothing stirred. The Yukon slept under a coat of ice three feet thick. No breath of wind blew. Nor did the sap move in the hearts of the spruce trees that forested the river banks on either hand. The trees, burdened with the last infinitesimal pennyweight of snow their branches could hold, stood in absolute petrifaction. The slightest tremor would have dislodged the snow, and no snow was dislodged. The sled was the one point of life and motion in the midst of the solemn quietude, and the harsh churn of its runners but emphasized the silence through which it moved.

  * * *

  Bert Hargrave partnered with Jack for a bit and, after a winter together, probably knew Jack better than anyone. One day when Hargrave was sick and meat was scarce, Jack and another mining companion, Doc Harvey, broke trail for eighty miles to kill a moose and bring it back to their ailing friend.

  Jack was always available to help Emil and others. He often foraged through other cabins to find good reading material for Emil, or he’d assist with the dogs and sleds. He’d even “undertake a two days’ hike for plug of tobacco when he saw us restless and grumpy for the want of a smoke.”

  Once, Jack produced a quart of whiskey he’d been saving, a rare item in the camps, maybe the only such bottle within hundreds of miles. Emil’s partner Charlie Borg had broken his ankle while crossing the Chilkoot, and the infected wound now threatened his life.

  Doc Harvey had to amputate, so Jack ran to his cabin to fetch the bottle of whiskey he’d kept secret. Only whiskey would make the amputation bearable for patient and doctor alike. Emil Jensen later said, “One quarter of the bottle, or jug, went down [Harvey’s] throat to steady his nerves, and the remainder of the whisky saved the life of his patient.… Thanks to the benumbing effect of that whisky, my partner survived the butchering, for butchering it was, as cruel as it was necessary.” Everyone swigged from the bottle as the patient screamed. Jack didn’t flinch.

  He heard many yarns in the remote mining camp. One of them was later used in his story “To Build a Fire.” A cheechako was traveling one day over a frozen landscape at −70°F. It was so cold that when he spat, the spittle froze instantly in the air with a “sharp, explosive crackle that startled him.”

  Even though the old-timers in Dawson had said never to travel alone after it dropp
ed to −50°F, the tenderfoot had set out anyway. He should have stopped to make camp. He should have waited for it to warm up. He should have had a partner. If he stepped through the ice of the creek into the water, he’d never get dry by himself.

  Jack’s main character in the story reaches the juncture of the Stewart and Yukon Rivers before heading up Henderson Creek. He’s traveled a few miles and is quite pleased with himself for not freezing to death and thinks he knows more than the old-timers. Then he steps through the ice and gets hopelessly wet. He begins to realize his plight after he tries to make a fire, but such second thoughts are too late. He bares his hands to strike a match, but none of his muscles are working properly and he can’t hold the matches, so he puts them in his teeth and tries to light them. He knows that if he can’t make a fire, he’ll die. A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, comes to him. With no more matches and no way to make a fire, he knows he’s doomed. He runs but falls, and then dies in the snow, realizing the old-timers were right.

  The story came from a real-life event. A giant Irishman named Keogh froze to death that winter on the upper Stewart. Bert Hargrave was with Keogh when it happened and surely must have told Jack about it.

  Tappan Adney writes about this kind of cold:

  * * *

  Old-timers measure the temperate by the following system…: Mercury freezes at −40°; coal-oil (kerosene) freezes at from −35° to −55°, according to grade; “painkiller” freezes at −72°; “St. Jacob’s Oil” freezes at −75°; best Hudson’s Bay rum freezes at −80°. This last temperature was authoritatively recorded at Fort Reliance, six miles below Dawson; but such low temperatures were rarely observed and did not last more than a few days at a time, during which the old-timer simply stayed in-doors and kept warm.

  * * *

  In the bleakness of winter, the small wooden rooms of the cabins were centers of warmth and good cheer to any who showed up out of the cold. Miners from many countries and walks of life, priests, and Mounties, too, would get together to celebrate holidays. In “To the Man on Trail,” Jack’s first story published after his return from the Yukon, the men come together to eat and drink, and the character Malemute Kid, gives a toast:

  * * *

  Then Malemute Kid arose, cup in hand, and glanced at the greased-paper window, where the frost stood full three inches thick. “A health to the man on trail this night; may his grub hold out; may his dogs keep their legs; may his matches never miss fire.”

  * * *

  In “A Klondike Christmas,” Jack captures what it was like to be young and stuck in that little cabin in the wilderness on a holiday. This story begins with the Stampeder writing his mom, then moves into a description of the cozy, warm cabin.

  * * *

  Mouth of the Stuart River,

  North West Territory,

  December 25, 1897

  My dearest Mother:—

  Here we are, all safe and sound, and snugly settled down in winter quarters.

  Have received no letters yet, so you can imagine how we long to hear from home. We are in the shortest days of the year, and the sun no longer rises, even at twelve o’clock.

  Uncle Hiram and Mr. Carter have gone to Dawson to record some placer claims and to get the mail, if there is any. They took the dogs and sled with them, as they had to travel on the ice. We did expect them home for Christmas dinner, but I guess George and I will have to eat alone.

  I am to be cook, so you can be sure that we’ll have a jolly dinner. We will begin with the staples first. There will be fried bacon, baked beans, bread raised from sour-dough, and—

  * * *

  Living in such close quarters in the gloomy gray of the winter half-light for so many months could also drive miners mad, even to murderous acts.

  Once, Jack used Merritt Sloper’s ax to chop a hole through the ice to get some water. It was dark, and he chopped hard, not realizing he was chopping into gravel instead of ice, dulling the blade. Sloper became murderously angry, after which Jack moved out of that cabin and into a cabin with Doc Harvey and Bert Hargrave.

  Doc Harvey was a popular man in camp, a man of few words. When he did speak, he always said interesting things, and he really knew how to listen. But living in the close quarters of a small cabin in extreme winter conditions was tough, no matter who your cabinmates were, and relations grew strained even with his closest friends. Jack would later capture the essence of that personal tension and Klondike cabin fever in the story “In a Far Country,” when two cabinmates in deep winter descend into hatred until they kill each other.

  SCURVY IN THE CREEKS

  THERE WERE MANY WAYS to die during the gold rush. Hiking over the Chilkoot with so much gear, Stampeders faced death from the cold, exhaustion, heart attack, bear attack, sickness, flood, and avalanche. Near misses were frequent: people sprained their ankles, broke legs, were scalded by pots of boiling water, got hypothermia, and fell in the Dyea River, etc., etc. It was a dangerous hike. Stampeders died of drowning in lakes, either falling through the ice in the winter or going down with their crude boats in the lakes above Miles Canyon. The Whitehorse Rapids took a few lives. Illnesses like spinal meningitis and tuberculosis took lives, too. Some were murdered by fellow Stampeders, but not as many as one might expect with such a rough group of people undergoing the hardships of the trail and river. A fire in a Dyea bunkhouse took a few lives. In the creeks around Dawson, there was another danger, this one from not having the right foods to eat: scurvy.

  As winter wore on, with supplies running short and cabin living feeling more and more cramped, people’s personalities were tested to the limit. Some miners couldn’t take the harshness as their health deteriorated. One miner from a small creek wrote a letter home, saying, “A man, in order to get along nicely in this country as a prospector, should be in the best health, strong in muscle, of a cheerful disposition, and ready to rough it, with a determination to overcome all obstacles. The man who cannot stand the roughest kind of work ought never to come here.” Young Jack in his prime, who everyone said had a cheery and positive disposition, was the kind of person who got along nicely in that country … until he came down with scurvy.

  Scurvy was also known as the “Klondike plague” or “Arctic leprosy.” Caused by a deficiency in vitamin C, scurvy often affected poorly nourished sailors on long voyages, and it ravaged many Stampeders the winter Jack tried to work his mine.

  Yukon writer Pierre Berton described the disease:

  * * *

  The legs go lame, the joints ache, the face becomes puffy, the flesh turns soft and pliable as dough, the skin becomes dry and harsh and mottled red, blue, and black. The gums swell and bleed, the teeth rattle in the head and eventually drop out. The breath becomes a stench, the face turns yellow or leaden, and the eyes sink in the skull until the victim, a living skeleton, expires.

  * * *

  That winter, scurvy took the sap out of vibrant Jack London. His constant diet of bacon, beans, and bread, and little or no fresh fruits and vegetables, with their essential vitamin C, wore him down.

  “Right leg drawing up,” Jack wrote, “can no longer straighten it, even in walking must put my whole weight on toes.” The very man who had carried 150-pound loads up the Chilkoot now succumbed to the horrible symptoms. His gums swelled; his teeth were about to fall out. His limbs went numb, and he doubled up like a cripple.

  Also, he and his partners had found very little gold (a poor showing of “color”), but they’d found plenty of fool’s gold, or iron pyrite, a brassy yellow mineral with a metallic luster that is often mistaken for gold and has no value. Pyrite contains a high percentage of iron and is not an element or metal, but rather an ore. Lucky miners on other creeks were already washing and storing real gold in their cabins. Jack and his partners had no gold to store. Their claims were just not panning out.

  Only Fred Thompson kept thinking he’d strike it rich. Maintaining his aloof yet gentlemanly demeanor, he was the one partner who refused t
o admit defeat. “I just know we’re going to strike it rich, and very soon!” he said. Some of the men thought he was arrogant, but only Fred held fast to his vision of striking it big on Henderson. He never did find his golden stash, though he kept looking long after the others had given up.

  By Christmas, Jack and his Henderson pals were “thoroughly disillusioned.” Yet Jack’s optimistic friend Emil later wrote that “we were young, and we had gained much in the way of experience; and our muscles had grown hard as nails.” Emil continued, “Looking at it from every angle but the one for which we had come, and for which we had endured so much, it proved all that I … could have wished for.”

  Jack lost a lot of weight. He was like a stick with clothes, but he also remained extremely resilient. He began to think he might now have the raw material for some magazine articles and essays. Although he hadn’t kept a journal in the Klondike, his passion for writing had never left him.

  One day, Jack stepped outside and carved a blaze in a spruce tree near the cabin. A local trapper passing by asked why he’d put the mark in the tree. Weak from scurvy, Jack nevertheless replied with the confidence of a timber wolf, “Because someday I’ll make my mark as a writer.”

  Back inside the stove-steamy cabin, Jack stood and grabbed a pencil in his gloved hand. Though he was weak, he began to write firmly on a log near his bunk five feet from the floor, holding the pencil the way a painter holds a paintbrush, with thumb and forefinger stretched out along the pencil. He scratched into the wood these words: Jack London, miner, author, Jan 27 1898.