Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899 Read Online Free PDF Page A

Holt pushed directly in from the seacoast through the Chilkoot Pass, the only known gap in the armoured underbelly of Alaska.
    In 1882 Ed Schieffelin went round to the Bering Sea opposite Siberia and moved up the long water highway of the Yukon River itself.

    Harper was the first of this trio, an Irishman with a square face, shrewd eyes, and a great beard that later turned snow-white and gave him the look of a frontier patriarch. Gold had drawn him north on the stampedes to the Fraser and the Cariboo in the fifties and sixties. Here, staring at his Arrowsmith’s map of British North America, Harper asked himself why, if the run of gold stretched from Mexico to British Columbia, it should not continue north beyond the horizon. Beyond the horizon he went, with five gallons of strong rum and five cronies, pushing down the Peace River in canoes hacked out of cottonwood poplar trunks, following the line of the mountains on their great northward curve across the Arctic Circle and into Alaska. Twenty-five years later thousands would follow in his wake, on the same vain errand.
    For two thousand miles Harper and his companions paddled and prospected, tracking their boats across the mountain divides, until at last, in 1873, they reached the Yukon River at its mid-point, where it curves across the Circle. For the next quarter-century the river was Harper’s highway; he roamed it, seeking the will-o’-the-wisp in every tributary stream, testing the gravels, panning the sand-bars, always hoping to find the treasure, yet never succeeding. The gold was under his nose, but he missed it. He explored four rivers that later yielded fortunes – the Stewart, the Fortymile, the Tanana, and the Klondike – but he did not make the longed-for discovery. When he died, in 1897, it was too late. The stampede had started and there was gold to be had by the shovelful, but Arthur Harper was an old man by then, worn out from tuberculosis, slowly expiring in the Arizona sunlight.
    Nor did George Holt, the first man through the coastal mountains, find gold on the Yukon, though he sought it as fiercely as Harper. He is a vague and shadowy figure, scarcely more than a name in the early annals of Alaska, but he is remembered for a remarkable feat: he was the first white man to penetrate the massive wall of scalloped peaks that seals off the Yukon Valley from the North Pacific Ocean. These mountains were guarded by three thousand Indian sentinels, and how he got past them no man knows.
    In the alpine rampart that Holt conquered, the shrieking winds had chiselled a tiny notch. It could be reached only after a thousand-foot climb up a thirty-five-degree slope strewn with immense boulders and caked, for eight months out of twelve, with solid ice. Glaciers of bottle green overhung it like prodigious icicles ready to burst at summer’s end; avalanches thundered from the mountains in the spring; and in the winter the snow fell so thickly that it could reach a depth of seventy feet. This forbidding gap was called the Chilkoot Pass, and Holt was the first white man to set eyes upon it. Because it was the gateway to the Yukon Valley, the Chilkoot Indians guarded it with a jealousy bordering on fanaticism.
    They were men of immense cunning and avarice, these Indians – squat and sturdy and heavy-shouldered and able to lug a two-hundred-pound pack across the mountains without rest. They were a crude, cruel race with Mongolian features and drooping Fu Manchu moustaches, who existed on a diet of dried salmon, a pungent concoction that one explorer described as tasting like a cross between Limburger cheese and walrus hide. They reserved for themselves all trade with the “Stick” Indians of the interior, whom they held in virtual bondage; and they had even driven the powerful Hudson’s Bay Company from the upper river by burning Robert Campbell’s Fort Selkirk in 1852.
    Yet Holt somehow ran the gantlet of this tribe, scaled the pass, and penetrated into that dark