Read Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 for Free Online

noted. Then he had signed on with the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Athabasca country, only to discover, to his chagrin, that he could not sustain the crushing two-hundred-pound loads his French-Canadian companions hoisted so easily on their backs. So he had moved on, drifting across the mountains into the Yukon Valley, where he and Harper and Mayo became partners.
    For more than fifteen years these three were alone with the land, the river their private thoroughfare. They could roam for a thousand miles without seeing another white face, and, indeed, McQuesten once recalled that he went for six years without tasting flour. They took Indian wives, but in no sense did they resemble the “squaw men,” who were looked down upon by their fellows. The traders did not live like Indians; their wives and families lived like whites in handsome homes of square-cut logs, with neat vegetable gardens at the rear. The wives were partners in the true sense, and the dusky children were sent out to be educated in private schools in the United States. Years later, when McQuesten retired, he took his Indian wife to California, where she became the mistress of a big home in Berkeley; and when he died, she managed his estate and became the head of the family.
    The country changed these men. Restless they had been, but over the long decades they developed a serenity of temperament that became the envy of all who encountered them. Frederick Schwatka, a U.S. cavalry officer who was the first man to explore the Yukon River for its full length, came upon McQuesten in 1883 and watched in admiration as the trader bargained for hours with Indians, unruffled through the endless palaver that “would have put Job in a frenzy.” McQuesten and his colleagues never presented a bill for an outfit, and they were seldom short-changed. Once when a cargo of goods arrived and a group of miners became impatient for provisions, Harper told them simply to help themselves, keep their own accounts, and hand them in at their leisure. The only discrepancy was six cans of condensed milk.
    The trio’s first post of Fort Reliance became the focus for future river settlements. Several neighbouring tributaries took their names from the distance that separated them from the post. Thus the Fortymile River and the Twelvemile were named because they joined the Yukon that distance downstream from Fort Reliance, and the Sixty-mile was so called because it was sixty miles upstream from the fort. Later on, the towns established at the mouths of these rivers took the same names. It is curious that this first river settlement should have been established a scant six miles from the mouth of that stream which came to be called Klondike, for, although they hunted and prospected along its valley, none of the partners was destined to grow wealthy on Klondike gold. Nor, on the other hand, did they die in poverty as others were to do. When the madness struck they kept their heads, and when they died it was with the respect of every man who had known them. They were, in the words of an Alaska Commercial Company employee, “typically frontiersmen, absolutely honest, without a semblance of fear of anything, and to a great extent childlike in their implicit faith in human nature, looking on their fellow pioneers as being equally as honest as themselves.” Few who came after them merited that accolade.
    Without these three men and a fourth named Joseph Ladue, who arrived a decade later, the series of events that led to the Klondike discovery would not have been possible. Without the string of posts they set up along the Yukon, the systematic exploration of the river country could not have taken place. They guided the hands of the prospectors, extending almost unlimited credit, sending them off to promising sections of the country, and following up each discovery by laying out a townsite and erecting a general store. Their little steamboat, the New Racket , which they had purchased from