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

land where the Yukon had its beginning. In 1878 he emerged with two small nuggets which an Indian from Alaska had given him, and his tales, embroidered by his own imagination, excited the interest of the men at Sitka, the Panhandle capital, which was teeming with the backwash of the Cassiar rush. Twenty prospectors, protected by a U.S. gunboat, debarked at Dyea Inlet not far from the foot of the Chilkoot, and here, after firing a few blank rounds from a Gatling gun, they convinced Chief Hole-in-the-Face that the pass should be opened.
    In this summary fashion was the dam broken; each year, from 1880 onward, the trickle of men crossing the divide increased. The Indians did not suffer by this invasion, for they charged a fee to pack the white man’s outfits across the mountains, and they always exacted what the traffic would bear, so that by the time of the Klondike stampede the price had reached a dollar a pound. Thus, without ever sinking a pan into the creekbeds of the Yukon, the canny Chilkoots became rich men.
    Holt, having breached one barrier, moved west to wilder land and tried to add to his exploits by invading the copper country of the Chettyna. The Indians there had three murders to their credit when Holt tried to slip through. Poor Holt made the fourth.
    Meanwhile, those who had followed in his wake had begun to find the flour gold that lay in the sand-bars of the Yukon, and rumours of these discoveries filtered down through the Rocky Mountain mining camps of the western United States until in 1882 the stories reached the ears of a gaunt scarecrow of a prospector named Ed Schieffelin.
    This was no penniless gold-seeker. In the Apache country of Arizona, Schieffelin had discovered a mountain of silver and founded the town of Tombstone, where Wyatt Earp had already completed his bloody tryst with the Clanton brothers at the O.K. Corral. He was worth one million dollars, but his appearance belied his wealth, for his beard and his glossy black hair hung long and ringleted and his grey ghost-eyes had the faraway look of the longtime prospector. He had panned gold as a toddler in Oregon and had run off at the age of twelve to join a stampede, and in the ensuing generation had been in almost every boom camp in the West. Now he was intent on repeating his Arizona success in Alaska. He, too, had studied the maps and arrived at an enchanting theory: a great mineral belt, he thought, must girdle the world from Cape Horn to Asia and down through the continental divide of North America to the Andes. Somewhere in Alaska this golden highway should cross the Yukon Valley, and Schieffelin meant to find it. The spring of 1883 found him and a small party at St. Michael, the old Russian port on the Bering Sea just north of the Yukon’s mouth, aboard a tiny steamboat especially built to penetrate the hinterland.
    The expedition puffed slowly around the coast of Norton Sound and into the maze of the great delta, where the channels fanned out for sixty-five miles and the banks were grey with alluvial silt; where long-legged cranes stalked the marshes; where the islands had never been counted; where a man could lose himself forever in half a hundred twisting channels. At this point they were more than two thousand miles from the Chilkoot Pass, which Holt had crossed five years before.
    Out into the river proper the little boat chugged – into a land of terraced valleys, sleeping glaciers, and high clay banks pocked by swallows’ nests and bright with brier rose and bluebell. Here was an empty domain of legend and mystery. In London, globes of the world were still being issued showing the Yukon River flowing north into the Arctic Ocean instead of west into the Bering Sea. And there were stories told – and believed – of prehistoric mammoths that roamed the hills with jets of live steam issuing from their nostrils, and of immense bears that prowled the mountain peaks in endless circles because their limbs were longer on one side than