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

on the other.
    To Schieffelin, the broad Yukon seemed to wind on endlessly, tawny and cold, gnawing through walls of granite and wriggling past mountain ranges, spilling out over miles of flatland at one point, trapped between black pillars of basalt at another. Occasionally a pinpoint of civilization broke the monotony of the grey-green forestland – the old Russian missions at Andreifski, Holy Cross, and Nulato, or the solitary totemic figures on the riverbank that marked the Indian graves. For a thousand miles the steamer struggled against the current, penetrating deeper and deeper into unknown country, past Burning Mountain, a perpetually smoking seam of coal; past the Palisades, fortress-like cliffs of rock that guard the Tanana’s mouth; and finally into the brooding hills known as the Lower Ramparts, where the river channels were gathered into a single rustling gorge.
    Here, poking about among the mosses and the rocks, Schieffelin found some specks of gold and was convinced that he had stumbled upon the mineral belt he believed encircled the earth. But already there was frost in the air, and the prospector, accustomed to the fierce Arizona sun, became discouraged by the bleakness of the Arctic summer. He concluded that mining could never pay along the Yukon, and he retraced his course without exploring the remainder of the long waterway, which drifted back for another thousand miles to the gateway of the Chilkoot. And so, as it had eluded Harper and Holt, the gold of the Yukon eluded the gaunt Schieffelin, who for all the remainder of his life never ceased to prospect and was, indeed, still seeking a new mine when he died of a heart attack in front of his cabin in the forests of Oregon. The year, by then, was 1897, and the world was buzzing with tales of a fortune to be found in that inhospitable land he had dismissed as frozen waste.
    2
    “Gold – all same like this!”
    For five years after Schieffelin’s departure the Yukon Valley maintained a primaeval silence. Small groups of prospectors continued to dribble over the Chilkoot Pass to test the bars along the headwaters, but the main river was virtually untravelled for eighteen hundred miles. The only boats upon its surface were those of the natives and of the occasional free trader working on a commission for the Alaska Commercial Company, the lineal descendant of the old Russian-American Fur Company.
    Arthur Harper was one of these. Frustrated in his attempts to find his fortune in the shifting sands of the tributary creeks, he had taken to bartering tea and flour for furs. Thus his memory endures in the north, for he was one of a trio of traders who helped to open up the Yukon Valley for the prospectors who followed.
    The two men who joined forces with Harper had arrived the same year that he did, in 1873, but by a different route. They were a Mutt-and-Jeff combination, one a lean, wiry little thong of a man, the other a six-foot giant with a barrel chest. The little man’s name was Al Mayo; he was a one-time circus acrobat driven north by wanderlust, given to practical jokes and blessed with a dry wit. In his later years he used to remark that he had been in the country so long that when he first arrived the Yukon was a small creek and the Chilkoot Pass a hole in the ground.
    The big man’s name was LeRoy Napoleon McQuesten, but everybody called him Jack. His florid features were marked by a flowing blond moustache and his temperament by that same restlessness which was a quality of almost every man who made his way north in the days before the Klondike strike. He had been a farmer in Maine and an Indian-fighter in the west and a gold-hunter on the Fraser, but, just as Harper was a frustrated prospector, McQuesten was a frustrated voyageur. He had wanted so badly to be one of those strange forest creatures that he gave himself a course in physical training so he might perform the incredible feats of strength and endurance for which the voyageurs were