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

March, 1887, by this time, and a group of prospectors, camped in the lee of the mountains waiting for the storm to abate, watched in astonishment as the figure of the Indian loomed out of the swirling snow. They followed him back up the mountainside and helped bring Williams down and revive him with hot soup. The Indian borrowed a sled and dragged his companion twenty-six miles down the trail to Dyea Inlet. Here the two finally reached the shelter of the trading post run by a one-time Montana sheriff named John J. Healy. Williams lived two days, and the men who crowded around his deathbed had only one question: Why had he made the trip?
    The Indian’s answer electrified them. He reached into a sack of beans on Healy’s counter and flung a handful on the floor.
    “Gold,” he said. “All same like this!”
    3
    The hermits of Fortymile
    Along the high bank at the point where the Fortymile River joins the Yukon, a weird and lonely village straggled into being as a result of Tom Williams’s dying message. It was named Fortymile after the river, and its remoteness from the world can scarcely be comprehended today, for it existed eight months out of twelve as if in a vacuum, its residents sealed off from the world. The nearest outfitting port was San Francisco, almost five thousand water miles distant, and the only links with the sea were two cockleshell stern-wheelers, the New Racket and the Alaska Commercial Company’s Arctic , built in 1889. These boats seldom had time to make more than one summer trip upstream from the old Russian seaport of St. Michael, near the river’s mouth on the Bering Sea. On her maiden voyage the Arctic was damaged and unable to bring supplies to Fortymile. The A.C. Company sent Indian runners sixteen hundred miles to the settlement to warn the miners that no supplies would be forthcoming, and that they must escape from the Yukon Valley or starve. As the October snows drifted down from the dark skies, the Fortymilers pressed aboard the New Racket , and the little vessel made a brave attempt to reach St. Michael before the river froze. She was caught in the ice floes one hundred and ninety miles short of her goal, and the starving passengers had to continue the journey on foot. Those who remained at the community of Fortymile spent a hungry winter: indeed, one man lived for nine months on a steady diet of flapjacks.
    The only winter route to the outside world was the gruelling trek upstream to the Chilkoot, more than six hundred miles distant. After Williams’s death it was seldom attempted. Four men who tried it in 1893 were forced to abandon fifteen thousand dollars in gold dust on the mountain slopes and were so badly crippled by the elements that one died and another was incapacitated for life.
    Who were these men who had chosen to wall themselves off from the madding crowd in a village of logs deep in the sub-Arctic wilderness? On the face of it, they were men chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of fortune – chasing it with an intensity and a singleness of purpose that had brought them to the ends of the earth. But the evidence suggests the opposite. They seemed more like men pursued than men pursuing, and if they sought anything, it was the right to be left alone.
    Father William Judge, a Jesuit missionary in Alaska, described them as “men running away from civilization as it advanced westward – until now they have no farther to go and so have to stop.” One of them, he discovered, had been born in the United States, but had never seen a railway: he had kept moving ahead of the rails until he reached the banks of the Yukon. They were Civil War veterans and Indian-fighters, remittance men from England and prospectors from the Far West. Many of them had known each other before in the Black Hills, or the Coeur d’Alene country of Idaho, or in the camps of Colorado. They were nomads all, stirred by an uncontrollable wanderlust, which seized them at the slightest whisper of a new strike,