The Klondike Stampede 1897-1899

[SwampDonkey]

A first person account of the Klondike Gold Rush by Edwin (Tappan) Adney pub. in 1900. This will be the abridged version.

[SwampDonkey]

Chilkoot Trail, State of Alaska and Yukon territory

The valley begins to rise rapidly, and the trail is very bad. A mile above Sheep Camp, on the left hand, a huge glacier lies on the side of the mountain, jutting so far over and downward that every moment one expects a great chunk to drop off and tumble into the river. A mile farther on is 'Stone House', a large square rock, crudely resembling a house; it stands on the river's brink. The valley is filled with great water and ice worn boulders. The trail climbs from one to another of these. The valley seems to end; a precipitous wall of gray rock, reaching into the sky, seems to head off farther progress, seaming its jagged contour against the sky, a great barrier, uncompromising, forbidding, the Chilkoot pass. Packers start to climb a narrow foot-trail that goes up,up,up. The packers and packs have disappeared in the gray of rock and earth. Look more closely. The eye catches movement. The mountain is alive. There is a continuous moving train; they are perceptible only by their movement, just as ants are. The moving train is zigzagging across the towering face of the precipice, up, up, into the sky, even at the very top.

[SwampDonkey]

Many are taking in sleds and dogs. Dogs are expensive. None suitable can be had here at any price, while those for the use of the mounted police, brought from eastward, cost nearly as much expressage as a horse would cost to buy. The sleds to one who is accustomed to the Indian toboggan, whether the flat upturned board or the New Brunswick kind with cedar sides and beech shoes, seem heavy, but are built by those who understand the needs of the country. They are 7 feet long, about 16 inches wide, with a height of 6 inches. The bow is slightly upturned, and the top, of four longitudinal pine slats, rests upon four cross-framed of ash, with ash runners shod with two-inch steel shoes.

[SwampDonkey]

August 19, 1897
The customs officer aboard the steamship Islander was surrounded by an eager crowd asking Questions.
'What is the penalty for theft at Skagway?'
'The miners give them twenty-four hours to leave; and if he doesn't leave, he is shot.'

From Glacier Bay we ran into a bank of fog, the Islander came to and dropped anchor. At 10:30 a.m. a meeting of the passengers was called to act upon the suggestions of the customs officer and to devise plans for the landing of our stuff. The steamship only undertakes to deliver passengers and freight at Skagway Bay. The work of landing the freight must be done by the passengers; the steamship people refuse to assume any responsibility.

[SwampDonkey]

August 20, 1897
Few of us had the inclination to look at the truly grand scenery with which we were surrounded. Snow and glacier capped mountains, rising thousands of feet from green, sparkling water, burying their lofty heads in soft, cottony clouds, are for other eyes than those of miners excited by the preparations for the real commencement of their journey.

I go ashore with two others and such a scene as meets the eye! There are great crowds of men rowing in boats to the beach, then clambering out in rubber boots and packing stuff, and setting it down in little piles out of reach of the tide. Here are little groups of men resting with their outfits. Tents there are of every size and kind, and men cooking over large sheet-iron stoves set up outside. Behind these are more tents and men, and piles of merchandise and hay, bacon smoking, men loading bags and bales of hay upon horses and starting off, leading from one to three animals along a sort of lane - which seems much travelled - in the direction of a grove of small cottonwoods, beyond which lies the trail towards White Pass. There are said to be 2500 people along the road between the bay and the summit.

[SwampDonkey]

August 21, 1897
One packer remarked: "There are more inexperienced men to the square foot than in any place I have ever been to, and more double-action revolvers. They ought to have left them home. It would be charity for the mounted police to take them all away, for they will be shooting themselves."

From another: "It is the inexperience of those who are trying to go over the pass. They come from desks and counters; they have never packed, and are not even accustomed to hard labour".

One party, now within 4 miles of the top, took in 10 horses, they lost 4. The roads are shelving, and the horses slip and break their legs, and have to be shot. Today two horses mired, fell, and smothered before owners could get their heads clear.

[SwampDonkey]

August 22, 1897
It is raining again tonight. None of the weather signs we are accustomed to in the East holds good here. A man who lived six years back of the Chilkoot Mountains says that this part of Alaska, at this time of the year, it will be clear and cold for four days, and then it will rain four days. It has rained the four days all right, and we are looking for the four sunny ones. This wet weather is discouraging. Every one feels miserable.

[SwampDonkey]

August 23, 1897

Day breaks clear. The sky is cloudless and the air is warm. Everyone is happy.

We come to an empty pack-saddle, and know something has happened here, as down the mountain-side the bushes are bruised, as if some heavy body had rolled down. We need no one to tell us that over the cliff a horse has rolled hundreds of feet, and lies out of sight among the bushes. Again an almost unbearable stench announces an earlier victim.

Sparks from a fire blew by wind, which burned out the back of the tent before neighbors extinguished it. The fire, however, burned the cover and part of the leather off my camera, yet without hurting the camera. It destroyed the tripod cover without touching the tripod; it burned the gun case without hurting the rifle; it burned some twenty pages of my diary, but took the back cover, where there was no writing, instead of the front leaves. The actual loss was a few envelopes. Altogether a remarkable escape.

We lay our coats under our heads for pillows, and our guns under the coats, and turn in. Of course we cannot take off anything but our coats and boots. We wake up in the middle of the night with rain in our faces. I put my broad hat over my face, turn over, and go to sleep again.

[SwampDonkey]

August 24, 1897

Rain, rain, all the time-no sunshine up in these mountains; tent pitched in a mud hole, bed made on the stumps and bushes, blankets and everything else wet and muddy. They are trying to dry out a hair-seal cap and some socks before a miserable fire. Even the wood is wet, and will only smoke and smoulder.

[SwampDonkey]

August 25, 1897

I have made careful inquiry about the loss of horses on the trail. The number at the present time is probably 20 killed, with considerably more badly hurt. Each day now about four horses are killed. The number is bound to increase as the trail grows worst. When the sun and rains of summer shall have melted the snow of the Chilkoots, the White Pass trail will be paved with bones of horses, and the ravens and foxes will have feasted as never until the white man sought a new way across the great mountain. As many horses as have come in alive, just so many will bleach their bones by the pine trees and in the gulches - for none will go out.

[sawguy21]

Amazing stories. The majority never struck it rich, they either died trying in the harsh environment or gave up and left penniless. A few did succeed by supplying the miners with needed goods and services, apparently Trumps grandfather prospered running a house of ill repute. :D

[SwampDonkey]

August 26, 1897

The Dyea River, it's course is through a level valley of sand, gravel and boulders, with groves and patches of cottonwoods and spruce and birch, while along its banks are thickets of alder and willow. The river is filled at this season with salmon, spawning, and with large, fine trout.

Dyea is chiefly an Indian settlement....composed of small, dirty tents and little wooden cabins crowded close together. There are no totem poles nor the large houses of more southern Alaska....it largely is a small settlement where Indians congregate from various quarters, the Chilkata, the Stikeen, and the Chilkoots. The Chilkoot women are hardly any of them good looking, and have a habit of painting their faces a jet black. The face is rubbed with balsam, then with burned punk, and this is rubbed in with grease. They do this, I am told, for the same reason that their white sisters use paint and powder. They leave enough of their faces untouched about the chin, mouth, and eyes to give them a hideous, repulsive expression.

The Indian men's dress is varied and picturesque. Some wear the gayly colored Mackinaw jacket; others a blue denim garment, half shirt, half coat; still others a loose coat of blanket, the sleeves or a patch across the back being made of the striped ends; and, as the blankets used by these Indians are of most brilliantly assorted colors, the color effects are distinctly striking. For head gear they wear common little felt hats or bright wool toques or a colored kerchief. All posses rubber hipboots, but when packing they wear only moccasins outside of blanket socks, and sometimes an oversock to the knee.

[SwampDonkey]

August 29, 1897

Still drying out clothes and blankets.

Jim and Burghardt are chafing at the delays.  So they propose to do their own packing, if I replace the old 'skate' with a sound horse - a proposition to which I readily assent by giving him 'Nelly', leaving me now with five sound horses and 1400 pounds of stuff, not including the boat lumber.

It is impossible to give one an idea of the slowness with which things are moving. It takes a day to go four or five miles and back; it takes a dollar to do what ten cents would do back home.

[SwampDonkey]

August 30, 1897

Twenty tents, including a blacksmith shop, a saloon, and a restaurant. A tent, a board counter a foot wide and six feet long, a tall man in a Mackinaw coat, and a bottle of whiskey is called a saloon here. At the hotel a full meal of beans and bacon, bread and butter, dried peaches and coffee is served for 6 bits, or 75 cents. The Indians bring in salmon and trout, and sell them for 2 bits, or 25 cents, each. The salmon weigh from 10-12 pounds; the trout, 2 or 3 pounds.

The slowness of the pack trains is disheartening; horses laid off from loss of shoes; many are sore, and poor ones are playing out. The men do not know how to pack. The packers on their return tonight claim they were threatened with revolvers up the line by men the time of whose contracts had expired.

[SwampDonkey]

September 5, 1897

Wet blankets, saddles not cinched tight, saddles that do not fit, loads unequally balanced, are doing the sad work. We cannot see until the saddles are off what hundreds of horses are suffering.

[dgdrls]

I really enjoy reading the diary entries of
those who ventured out to places unknown
or new opportunities

Thanks for posting SwampDonkey,

D

[SwampDonkey]

Sheep Camp is 13 miles from Dyea. It is a convenient stage before the climb over the pass, which is 4 miles distant. It is also the last place on the Chilkoot trail where wood can be had for warmth and cooking. Two pack trains of ten horses each run the round trip from Dyea in charge of two men riding spare horses. There are several hundred horses in all. The rate of packing to this point is 14 cents a pound. This rate makes oats $16 a sack, and hay not less than $325 a ton.

The population of Sheep Camp may be classified as follows: those who have packed their own stuff thus far and are wavering, discouraged by bad weather; those moving their goods right through with horses or on their backs; professional gamblers, and a great swarm of men packing over the summit.

It has been a continual downpour for the past week. My goods are all here, stacked under canvas and rubber covers; but it seems a hopeless task to keep goods dry. Horses have almost no value, just the price of packing for a day; but it cost $10 for a set of shoes. Everything is the color of mud - men, horses, and goods.

Sheep Camp has a hotel. The proprietor, a Mr. Palmer, is a modest man is evident in that he has not placed his own name in letters equally large in front of the simple but gigantic word "HOTEL".  :D :D :D

When supper is over [at the hotel], the floor is thrown open for guests. All who have blankets unroll them and spread them on the floor, take off their socks and shoes and hand them on the rafters, place a coat under their heads, and turn in. By nine o'clock it is practically impossible to walk over the floor, for the bodies. In the morning the lavatory arrangements are of an equal simple sort. One simply walks outside to a brook that flows under one corner of the building.

[SwampDonkey]

September 12, 1897

Sheep camp is filling up with broken-down brutes [horse].  Their owners have used them and abused them to this point, and are too tender-hearted to put them out of their misery.
A wretched, thin, white cayuse came to my tent. It was raining a cold rain. He put his head and as much more as he could inside the tent, trying to get next to the stove.  He stayed there all night and was around all next day, and he had nothing to eat. I am certain he never felt the 44 caliber bullet back of his ear that evening. Thereupon a general killing off began, until carcasses were lying on all sides.

[SwampDonkey]

September 14, 1897

We start with our packs up the side of Chilkoot mountain. It seems to tower directly over one's head, whereas the actual average slope is about 45 degrees, consisting of a series of benches alternating with slide rock. The trail winds from bench to bench, and there are a number of trails all reaching the crest at about the same place. In several places the trail is very steep; one must climb on hands and knees from boulder to boulder - much, I fancy, as one would go up the pyramids. There is one very dangerous place; it is necessary to attach a rope to the pack-saddle, 2 or 3 men go ahead, and when the horse starts up they pull hard on the rope; otherwise he goes over backward, as one or two horses have done. Once on to, the trail crosses over one or two dirty glaciers, and then downward three or four hundred feet of easy pitch to the head of a steep glacier, in view of Crater Lake, a body of pure green water, lying in a great, rough crater-like basin of rock. Some were sledding goods on tarpaulins down the glacier. Piled on the boulders are caches of goods. Boatmen there are ferrying goods to the foot of the lake at 1 cent a pound. Forty dollars a day was paid for the use of one row boat, but the men were making more than that.

Next day it begins to storm down the valley - such a storm as I never saw before.

The storm continues for several days, with wind, snow and rain, the sun shining clear each morning through the rain.

Having waited several days in vain for the boat to come over the summit, we start back to Sheep Camp, and on the way we hear that Sheep Camp has been washed entirely away, and many persons lost. At "Stone House" the square stone is gone. Several parties camped there saw a stream of water and boulders coming off the mountain-top. The boulders leaping far out in air as they tumbled down, an immense torrent, and it poured into the Dyea River, undermining the big rock, flooding tents, carrying away several outfits, and speeding towards Sheep Camp. The catastrophe occurred on the 18th, at seven o'clock in the morning, before many were up. Only one life is known to have been lost. This disaster has decided many who were hanging in the balance. It has given them a good excuse to go back. Only the strong-hearted continue on their way. Amid destruction I hardly expected to find my boat lumber, but it has been removed to a place of safety by the packer.

[SwampDonkey]

It is snowing as we again climb the summit, making the ascent both difficult and dangerous. The storm still rages at Long Lake. Tents are being blow down.

We start for Lindeman. The drop of 800 feet in elevation from Long Lake to Lindeman puts one into a new and smiling country. There are a 120 tents at the lake, half that number of boats in process of building, half a dozen saw pits at work, and a general air of hustle-bustle. We ferry to the end of Long Lake. A portage of a few hundred yards to Deep Lake, and another ferryman takes us to the foot, where we set up camp.

Lindeman is a beautiful lake, four and a half miles long, and narrow with towering mountain on the opposite side. At its head, on the left hand, a river enters, and there is timber for boats up the river. We pitch tent in a lovely spot, on which we decide to build our boat.

Everyone is in a rush to get away. Six to ten boats are leaving daily.

A party usually sends 2 men ahead to build the boats. They must go either five miles up the river just spoken of and raft the logs down, and construct saw-pits, or else to a patch of timber two miles back, and carry the lumber all that distance on their shoulders. A saw-pit is a sort of elevated platform, 10 or 12 feet high. On this the log to be sawn is laid, and a man stands above with the whip-saw, while another works the lower end, and in this way they saw the logs into boards. The boards are rarely more than 9-10 inches in width. The boards are an inch thick, and planed on the edges. After the boat is built the seams are calked with oakum and pitched. The green lumber shrinks before it gets into the water, so that the boats as a rule leak like sieves, but the goods rest upon slabs laid upon the bottom cross-ribs.

[SwampDonkey]

The last of September it snowed six inches, and it continued to snow a little each day after that. We had to work under an awning.

I was laid up for a week - the constant wet and cold had been too much. Work stopped on our boat. On the 4th of October the snow went off. On October 5th our boat is finished. She stands 23 feet over all; 6 feet beam; 16 feet by 30 inches bottom; draught, 18 inches with 1500 lbs of cargo. We start out the 6th of October and in a short while are at the foot of the lake, where several other boats are about to be lined through a nasty thoroughfare into Lake Bennett.

J.B. Burnham in Forest and Stream describes Tappan Adney

"One of the men was a slender six footer, with a face wind-tanned the color of sole-leather. He wore weather-stained clothes that, judging from the general suggestion, no doubt still carried a little of the smoky smell and balsam aroma from camps in the green woods of New Brunswick. His feet were moccasined, and his black hair straggled from under a red toboggan cap. Not only was his rig suggestive of the aborigine, but his every action proved him to be so thoroughly at home in his untamed environment that it is little wonder that at first glance I took him to be an Indian, and that it required several minutes after his jolly smile and voluble greeting to dispel the illusion."

[moodnacreek]

Man, Swamp can type, not me.  Anyhow when i was a boy my mother enrolled me in some book of the month club. The Alaskan Gold Rush was my favorite and I read it over and over. Next the movie came out and the guy who married Hank Williams widow, Johny Horton sang ' Big Sam left Seattle in the year of '92.................

[SwampDonkey]

About 12 miles down, the lake narrows to about half a mile, and here the waves are terrific, and the cross-waves break over the tarpaulin covering the goods amidships. In the midst of it all the mast goes overboard with a snap. Brown gathers in the sail, and, still scudding, we drop behind a point fortunately close at hand. Here we are able to get a new and larger mast.

At evening we run into a little cove opposite the west arm on Bennett Lake, with a smooth, sandy beach, where there are other boats. Around the campfire that night eager questions are plied to know just what is going on in Dawson.  

"Would there be starvation?"
"I have been eleven years in Alaska, and there hasn't been a year yet when everybody wasn't going to starve, but no one has starved yet."
"How cold is it?"
"Cold, but not so cold but a man can stand it. I spent one winter in a tent."

By noon we reach the foot of Bennett Lake, between banks a few yards apart,the green waters of the lake start again through Caribou Crossing. About a mile, and the stream enters a very shallow, muddy lake, 2 or 3 miles long, called Lake Nares, and then through another slack thoroughfare into Tagish Lake.

After drifting about 2 miles, we see ahead, against a bank of evergreens on the right, the red flag of Britain and some tents, and come to a landing in shallow water at the Canadian customs office. We make camp, and before dark the others drop in and camp.

We wait until noon next day for the flotilla of canoes, which do not appear, and then put off again. We think a good deal over Inspector Strickland's words - that for the past 3 years the Klondike has been frozen tight on the 13th of October. It is now the 12th.

[SwampDonkey]

At Marsh Lake, the sky is clear, and when darkness sets in the air grows bitterly cold, and we bundle up to keep warm. About nine o'clock we put ashore, a place where there is dry land, build a big camp fire, and cook supper. The shore ice, as it rises and falls on the gently undulating surface of water, creaks and cries for all the world like a hundred frogs in spring time, and it is indeed a dismal sound that bodes us no good.

Waiting only to finish eating, we put out again into the lake. We head for a point about 2 miles off. We are about half way there when the bow of the boat crashes into thin ice. We turn out and clear the ice, when again we crash into ice. We cut through this, turning further out, until we are crosswise of the lake. Again we strike into ice. I am at the oars now. We pass through 2 or 3 distinct belts of ice that extent far out into the lake. We are now almost in a panic, for it seems as if the outlet must be frozen up tight. When we get clear water we head north again, keeping out from the shore, and towards morning we land and spread our blankets on the ground among some spruces with several inches of snow on the ground. After a short nap it is daylight,  and we start again. There are no other boats in sight. We are soon floating down a slack stream several hundred feet wide. The current is easy.

We go on thus for about 20 miles, the river growing more swift. We lie this night on the ground under a big spruce, and awake next morning wet with soft snow, which fell during the night. After an hour's run in swift current we pass a boat smashed on a rock. Soon we hear a shout, "Look out for the Canyon!" and on the right hand see boats lined up in a large eddy, below which is a wall of dark rock and an insignificant black opening. We pull into the eddy alongside. We go up the trail to a spot where we can stand on the brink and look directly down into the seething waters of the gorge.

[SwampDonkey]

We tuck the tarpaulin down close and make everything snug. We push off and head for the gateway. As soon as we are at the very brink we know it is too late to turn back, so when we slide down the first pitch I head her into the seething crest. At the first leap into the soapsuds the spray flies several feet outward from the flaring sides. A dozen or two huge lunges into the crests of the waves, and we know that we shall ride it out. Brown, who manages the oars splendidly, keeps dipping them, and in a few moments we emerge from between the narrow walls into an open basin.

There are a number of boats here too, but having nothing to stop for, we keep on into Squaw Rapids, which some regard as worse than the Canyon; when suddenly remembering that the White Horse Rapids is only one and a half miles below, we drop ashore, just above a turn of the river to the left, and make a landing at a low bank.