← Legends of the Old West
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- [00:01]
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Chris Wimmer
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Narrator
After a month of travel to reach the Klondike Gold Strike In Yukon Territory, 21 year old Jack London had crossed 1500 miles of ocean by steamship, 100 miles of river by canoe, and 33 miles by foot over terrain for which the word rugged didn't even come close to describing. And the 33 miles of distance was deceptive. That was 33 miles on a map. Jack and many of the other men who rushed to the gold strike were responsible for carrying hundreds of pounds of supplies with them. At Jack's peak, he could carry a load of between 100 and 150 pounds. For the sake of easy math, if he were responsible for a total of £1,000 of supplies and he could carry a load of £100 one mile up
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Chris Wimmer
the trail, then he had to drop that load and walk one mile back to his stockpile of supplies, grab another
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Narrator
load of 100 pounds, strap it to his back and walk a mile forward
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Chris Wimmer
to drop it with the first load.
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Narrator
That meant to carry the total of 1,000 pounds of supplies just one mile up the trail.
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Chris Wimmer
Jack actually walked 20 miles and that
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Narrator
meant to cover the 33 miles of
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Chris Wimmer
the Chilkoot Trail from the starting point at Dyea, Alaska to the end of the overland portion of the journey at Lake Lindeman, Canada. Jack walked 600 to 700 miles while
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Narrator
carrying a pack of supplies on his back every inch of the way. And it would be one thing to try that kind of challenge after doing months of training and while wearing modern athletic gear and in the perfectly sunny conditions of a place like San Diego. But Jack did it In August of 1897, while wearing old woolen clothes and boots that would seem barbaric by today's standards. And while slogging up a muddy trail and being battered by wind and drenched by rain and sometimes pelted with snow. And sleeping in a tent on muddy
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Chris Wimmer
ground every night and surviving on nothing but beans, bacon and bread. After about 25 days of the journey, Jack and his four traveling companions were just three miles from the end of the 33 mile trail. The finish line of the hiking portion of the trip was tantalizingly close. And then a vicious rumor invaded their camp. The news made it seem like the entire trek and all the hardship they had endured was for nothing.
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Narrator
Jack and his team were at a place called Happy Camp. They had successfully crossed a mountain out of Alaska and entered Canadian territory. Happy Camp was a raw campground just three miles from the lake where they would finally stop carrying their supplies.
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Chris Wimmer
All the travelers known as stampeders, who made it that far reach were weary. Deep in their bones. They had to haul their hundreds of
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Narrator
pounds of supplies just three more miles
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Chris Wimmer
before the overland journey was done. Granted, when they made it the three miles to Lake Lindemann, the journey didn't become easier. The rest of the trip was equally hard, just in a different way. At Lake Lindemann, the stampeders had to cut down trees and build boats, which they would use to travel another 550 miles up the Yukon river to the gold strike. As hard and as painful as that work would be, there was one scenario that was worse. And that was why the rumor that crept into Happy Camp was so painful. A man who was traveling back from Lake Lindemann reported that there were no more trees from which to build boats. They had all been cut down. The stampeders at Happy Camp were too late. They had done all that work and suffered all that agony on the trail for nothing. Some stampeders sat down and wept in the mud. Others nearly went mad. But Jack refused to believe the rumor. He and his four traveling companions, Jim Goodman, Fred Thompson, Ira Sloper, and Martin Tarwater, kept going. They made it to Lake Lindemann on September 8, 1897, one month and one day after they had started out from Dyea, Alaska. The trees around the lake had been severely cut back. That was true, but they weren't gone. The rumor was exaggerated. There was still hope to make it to the strike before winter stopped their progress in October. There was hope, but it was razor thin. All they knew was that sometime in October, the Yukon river would freeze if they had not covered the 550 miles between Lake Lindemann and Dawson City, the town that was the headquarters of the Gold Rush. They would be trapped in the brutal cold and snow for eight long months. There was not a moment to lose. Ira Sloper was an expert woodworker who crafted the body of their boat while Jack focused on making the sails. There were no shortcuts and no compromises. Even though they needed to work fast, a poorly built boat could kill them long before winter. The work took two weeks. On September 24, 1897, Jack London's team launched their 27 foot boat carrying thousands of pounds of supplies into Lake Lindemann. Lindeman was a small lake that was fed by the much larger Lake Bennett. They moved up into Lake Bennett and then into the Yukon river. Their first 24 hours on the river went well. The boat proved to be sturdy. But the real test would happen the second day. As the boat approached the entrance to Miles Canyon where the infamous White Horse Rapids waited, the men saw an ominous sign.
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Officers of the Northwest Mounted Police patrolled
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the shoreline on both sides of the river to retrieve the bodies of the men who had drowned in the rapids. From Black Barrel Media, this is Legends of the Old West. I'm your host Chris Wimmer and this season we're telling stories of the Klondike Gold Rush where famous author Jack London and 100,000 other people raced through Alaska to the Yukon in search of riches. This is episode two Fight for Survival. Jack London and his companions were some of the earliest stampeders to leave from California. But they certainly weren't the earliest stampeders overall. There were several ways to get to the gold strike along Rabbit Creek, renamed Bonanza Creek, outside Dawson City. Depending on a person's starting point and resources, gold was discovered in August of 1896 and the news reached the American West Coast 11 months later. Jack was among the first to hear it when it made it to San Francisco. Just eight days after learning of gold, Jack and his 60 year old brother in law James shepherd were on a steamship bound for Juneau, Alaska. On the ship they met Goodman, Thompson and Sloper. The five men teamed up and from Juneau they helped paddle canoes 100 miles north to Dyea, Alaska where the grueling 33 mile overland trek started. James shepherd made it just nine miles. Even with Jack carrying most of his supplies, James was forced to concede that he would not survive the trip and he headed back to California alone and dejected. The four man team added Martin Tarwater who was 66 years old but but far More energetic than James Shepard and Martin was traveling light when the men did the trip. In the waning days of the summer of 1897, the Canadian government did not yet require stampeders to transport 2,000 pounds of supplies per person in order to give themselves a fighting chance for survival. That requirement happened in the spring of 1898, but most stampeders were essentially doing it anyway. Most people transported between 400 and 2,000 pounds of supplies and Jack and three of his companions seemed to be on the upper end of that range. In the final week of September 1897,
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they loaded thousands of pounds of supplies
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Chris Wimmer
into the boat they had just built by hand on the edge of Lake Lindemann. On the second day of the 550 mile trip up the Yukon river, the crew reached the dangerous White Horse rapids in Miles Canyon. Canadian Northwest Mounted Police officers walked the shoreline, pulling out the bodies of stampeders who drowned in the rapids and encouraging others to get off the river and carry their boats and supplies past the rapids. Jack London had survived hours of battering by a typhoon off the coast of Japan when he was a crewman on a ship at age 17. He and the rest of the team were confident they could handle a few minutes of whitewater rapids and they plunged in.
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The 27 foot boat dove into the churning foaming rapids.
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Five men loaded down with thousands of pounds of supplies had one chance to get it right. Jack gripped the paddle and steered through capsized boats and floating corpses. They dodged massive boulders and whirlpools which tried to swallow them whole. The canyon was one mile long and they ran the one mile gauntlet with only a single broken paddle as a casualty. The crowd of stampeders in the canyon exploded in cheers when Jack guided the boat to the shore for a rest. Stampeders mobbed the boat and begged him to navigate their boats through the rapids. It was a huge decision, possibly a life changing or life threatening decision. It was September 25th. If they took the deadline literally that they had to be 550 miles up the river in Dawson City by October, then they had just five days to complete the trip.
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Even if the Yukon river didn't freeze
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solid right on October 1st, they couldn't afford to push their luck. But the stampeders were offering $25 per boat. That would be more than $800 per boat in today's money. Jack and the team thought the money was worth the delay. Over the next few days, Jack guided 120 boats through the rapids. He probably saved hundreds of lives and if every boat paid him $25. He made the modern equivalent of $96,000 for a few days work. But even with the unexpected windfall of cash, Jack and the team couldn't stay in Miles Canyon forever. October was just a few hours away and they had barely started the 550 mile river journey. Jack and his four companions climbed back into their own boat and resumed their trip. They cruised up the Yukon river at a great pace. They traveled more than 500 miles in just a few days. But they also learned that the October deadline was nearly as literal as it had sounded. Each day brought deeper cold, thicker fog and more ice choking the river. Just eight days into the month of October, they were in serious trouble.
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Chris Wimmer
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Chris Wimmer
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Chris Wimmer
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Chris Wimmer
50 miles short of Dawson City, ice stopped Jack and the team at the mouth of the Stuart River. The five companions made it 500 of the 550 mile river journey. Overall, they had survived three months of agony and had traveled 550 of the 600 miles from Dyea, Alaska to Dawson City. Based on their progress, they could have made it all the way if they hadn't paused for a few days to help other stampeders through Whitehorse rapids. That decision likely gnawed at Jack London and the team during the merciless months ahead. Their journey halted for the winter near the junction of the Yukon river and Stewart river, and they soon learned from other stampeders that they would have faced problems even if they had made it all the way. As the five men made an emergency plan to survive the winter in raw country, news arrived that there was no room in Dawson City for any more stampeders. The men had heard similar scary rumors throughout their journey and few proved to be true. Even if it was true, they had no intention of abandoning the trip and turning back. But four of the five men in the group decided they would not press their luck any further in winter. Jack London, Jim Goodman, Fred Thompson and Ira Sloper were transporting hundreds of pounds of supplies per man and they believed it was safer to hole up for the winter, as demoralizing as the choice might be, rather than to carry their supplies on foot through the worsening conditions. But 66 year old Martin Tarwater, the grizzled cook who joined them in Alaska, decided to risk winter's fury with a different group who were desperate to reach Dawson City. Jack, Jim, Fred and Ira watched Martin walk away and disappear into a haze of white. And they never saw him again. The four men, who had stayed together since they met on a steamship leaving California three months earlier, found an abandoned cabin on the shoreline. It was a single room, 10ft by 12ft and made from primitive logs. It would now be home to four grown men and piles of supplies. For eight months. A small metal stove in the cabin burned hot enough to cook food, but not hot enough to heat the room. Three feet from the stove, supplies froze solid.
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The men had been surviving on the sacred bees, beans, bread, bread and bacon for the past three months, and now
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Chris Wimmer
they would have to do so for another eight months. They melted ice for drinking water and they settled in to wait, for the most part. A couple weeks later, in November, Jack struck out alone on snowshoes to stake a claim at nearby Henderson Creek. He found another abandoned cabin and spent weeks living in a refrigerator, as he described it in his diary, before rejoining the group in December. By that time, two months into winter, cabin fever had already sunk its claws deep. Six months of colder, darker weather lay ahead. Snow and ice carpeted the cabin floor. The men slept on animal hides, lit candles until they burned out and then burned bacon grease for light. The cramped quarters reeked. The men were easily agitated and arguments erupted. Often, Jack became their lifeline.
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Narrator
He chain smoked cigarettes and spun stories to keep the men entertained. They kept conversations flowing and card games running with other stampeders who were wintering nearby.
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Chris Wimmer
But as the weeks crawled by and temperatures plunged, their situation turned desperate. Jack turned 22 in January 1898, and by February they battled temperatures that bottomed out at -68 degrees Fahrenheit. Everyone was sick. Their situation worsened through March, even as the end of winter was in sight. They just needed to survive the month
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of April, and then the snow would
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begin to melt and the ground would begin to thaw. They could get back on the river and finish the trip to Dawson City. But by April, scurvy ravaged them all. Jack's case turned severe. He needed medical attention fast. But nothing moved quickly in the tundra. And as bad as their situation was, it was about to be much worse. On the trail behind them, a disaster happened on the Golden Stairs. As April thawed the Alaskan side of the Chilkoot Trail and the ground softened, a fresh wave of hopeful miners began
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their assault on the treacherous path Jack London had recently conquered.
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Chris Wimmer
They faced the long walk to Sheep Camp and then the steep hike to the scales at the base of the coast mountains. And then the torturous climb up the side of the mountains to the summit at Chilkoot Pass. In winter, when snow and ice covered the mountains, the stampeders had gradually chiseled crude steps into the snow and ice. From the scales at the base of the mountains to the summit at Chilkoot pass, there were 1500 steps, which became known as the Golden Stairs. The incline forced the stampeders to march up the side of the mountains in a single file line at a 45 degree angle while carrying packs of supplies on their backs. Famous photos of the Golden Stairs make the experience look like the definition of misery. Sometime in the winter of 1898, the enterprising businessman of the Alaska Railroad and Transportation Company built A gasoline powered cable car system to carry supplies to the summit for a hefty fee, of course. The tramway, as it was called, was likely completed around March 1, about a month before the mountains started sending warning signs. February and March had hammered the Chilkoot
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Trail with relentless snow.
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When the winds warmed up in April, the native Tlingit guides, whose people had lived in the mountains for generations, read the signs and refused to venture above Sheep Camp. They warned stampeders about continuing up the mountain, but gold fever overrode the risk of trouble.
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By midnight On Palm Sunday, April 3,
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1898, tramway operators spotted snow slides all around the Golden Stairs and echoed the warnings of the native guides. They urged the stampeders to retreat from the Scales, to move down from the base of the mountain toward the tree line. Stampeders ignored the warnings. At 2am about 200 men were camped at the scales when the first avalanche hit. John Morgan, a hopeful miner from Emporia, Kansas, jolted awake from the shriek of a falling stovepipe as his tent collapsed under a sudden crushing weight of snow. He and his party clawed their way out of the snow and emerged into the chaos of stampeders who frantically dug for others who had been buried alive. Shortly after, Morgan survived. He paused for a moment to write a quick entry in his diary. He said it was a miracle that everyone survived the first quote, quote, warning shot. And that's what it was, because the slides kept coming. They tore down the mountain all night and all morning. Ja. Rines was ripped from his sleep, carried
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down the mountain by a river of
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Snow and buried 30ft deep. Rescuers who saw him go under began urgently digging and pulled him to the surface moments before he suffocated. The rescued, like Mr. Rines, immediately became rescuers and helped dig out their neighbors where they heard screams.
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Some stampeders fled down the trail towards Sheep Camp.
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But the series of slides turned most of the men into rescuers. Thus, hundreds of stampeders were still on the mountain when conditions worsened. At 10am another warning shot hit the base camp and three stampeders were crushed in their tents. By 10:45, a full evacuation was underway. Every man above ground was working on a way to move down to Sheep Camp. Then a blizzard slammed into the stampeders in the blinding snow. Visibility was near zero. The strongest men tied a 200 foot rope to the waists of up to 130 people and linked them together in a human chain. Slowly, systematically, they began their march down, down the long hill to Sheep Camp, three miles in the distance. Around noon, the main avalanche struck. The thunderous roar was deafening. As tons of snow broke loose from the mountain and cascaded toward the stampeders. Three quarters of the group who were tethered to the rope were consumed in an instant. They were simply wiped away and disappeared as if they had never been. The remaining quarter those closest to Sheep Camp saw survived. From the safety of Sheep Camp, 2000 stampeders watched in horror as the mountains swallowed their comrades. As the snow settled, they raced up the hill with shovels Like a desperate army. They dug with a frenzy. They found the rope line quickly, but most of the men attached to it were already dead. The faint cries of those buried deeper grew quieter until a final, chilling silence
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fell over the mountain. John Morgan, the hopeful stampeder from Kansas who jotted the quick diary entry about
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Chris Wimmer
the miracle of surviving the 2am warning shot, never made it to Sheep Camp. He and dozens of others numbered among the dead.
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Narrator
Reports vary, but the death toll from
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Chris Wimmer
the Palm Sunday avalanche settled at approximately 65 people. News traveled fast, but it likely didn't reach the tiny cabin in which Jack London Jim Goodman, Fred Thompson and Ira Sloper continued to suffer the worsening effects of scurvy. Seven months in the cramped cabin had taken their toll. The air was toxic with cigarette smoke. The sub zero chill made every movement and every breath difficult. A monotonous diet of beans, bacon and bread left them starved for nutrients. They had no fruit or vegetables. The vitamin C deficiency caused dark spots to bloom on their skin like bruises. Their teeth loosened in their sockets. Their gums swelled and bled at the slightest touch. For Jack, a severe pain seized his lower ribs. By May, the final month of their torment, when they thought they could finally break free of the cabin, Jack was suffering hemorrhages which advanced so rapidly he was nearly crippled from the waist down. Jack needed urgent medical attention, and Mother Nature finally complied. The ground and the river thawed just enough for the group to travel the 50 miles to Dawson City. At that point, it appears as though Jack separated from Jim Goodman, Fred Thompson and Ira Sloper. Their stories mostly faded into history while Jack and another man dismantled the cabin that had been Jack's home for eight months and used the logs to build a raft. Jack and his friend rafted into Dawson City, and Jack headed for St. Mary's
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a small log cabin hospital run by Father William Judge.
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Father Judge was known as the Saint of Dawson, and his rudimentary hospital was
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a humble refuge from the mayhem of the boomtown around it.
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Chris Wimmer
A year earlier, Dawson City had been a quiet fishing village. Now it was a sprawling, Muddy morass of 17,000 people who were thrown together in a chaotic jumble of tents and
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cabins and rows of saloons.
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It was a city of extremes. Men who struck it rich were slapping down $25,000 bets on a single hand of poker, while others starved in the mud. As Jack lay in his hospital bed, the town's disorders swelled as the ice and snow melted. Miners scrambled into the rivers and fresh stampeders arrived in droves, many many of whom told stories of the horrors of the Palm Sunday avalanche on the golden stairs.
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A volunteer at the hospital, Harry Flaherty,
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described the recovery effort as stampeders dug out the dead. Some were found lying or standing, others in frightful positions with horrible expressions on their faces, while others looked as though they had just gone to sleep. The Northwest Mounted police and the U.S. army, said, Set up a makeshift morgue in sheep camp to identify victims, sort possessions and assign death certificates. Families in far off places received the news and in some cases they shipped the bodies of loved ones home. John Morgan was one such case, and his body returned to Kansas.
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But for most, the final journey was
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a sled ride to a burial ground called Slide Cemetery in Dyee, where they remain to this day. In the makeshift hospital in Dawson City. Father Judge fed Jack a vitamin C
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diet of limes, lemons and potatoes. It began to ease his symptoms, but it wasn't enough. Jack needed professional medical attention and fresh food. Dawson City, overrun and filthy, was short on everything. Father Judge's advice was blunt.
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Go home.
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The advice may have hurt more than Jack's physical symptoms.
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Chris Wimmer
For 10 months he had pushed his mind and body to the absolute edge of survival. All for the family dream of finding gold. Despite his current condition, he had made it to Dawson City so many times on the Chilkoot Trail or the Yukon river. He could have turned back. But he actually made it to the gold strike. And now the minister was telling him to go home. As Jack pondered an idea that would have seemed unthinkable just two months earlier, many other stampeders were having similar thoughts. After the avalanche, the price of gold finally became too steep. Hopefuls turned back in waves.
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Narrator
Suddenly, a desperate job search back home or the tedium of meeting menial labor didn't seem as desperate or as difficult as the borderline insane trek to the Klondike gold strike. During Jack London's month of recovery in Dawson City.
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He made his decision on June 8, 1898, as the new gold mining season
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raced to life all around him, Jack
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and two other men climbed into a
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small rowboat on the Yukon River. They rode and floated 1,500 miles down
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the Yukon to where it emptied into the Bering Sea. At the Port of St. Michael on the west coast of Alaska, Jack gained passage on a steamship as a coal shoveler to make his three week journey around Alaska and down the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco. In mid July, exactly one year after he left in search of riches, Jack arrived in Oakland, California.
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He he had a bittersweet reunion with
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his stepsister Eliza and her husband James shepherd, who had successfully returned home from Alaska the previous year. Jack was alive, but he was still sick with scurvy and had no gold to show for his adventure. At least not in the form of nuggets or dust. He would soon use the experience to earn his own gold.
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Eliza nursed Jack back to health, but
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the financial strain was a constant and unshakable weight on everyone. Eliza and James had mortgaged their house to fund the trip to find gold. When Jack and James came back with nothing, the family was in serious trouble.
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As soon as Jack's strength returned, he
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did the thing that came naturally and
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which had worked after his previous harrowing
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experience as a 17 year old sailor on board the Sophie Sutherland.
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Five years earlier, he and the crew
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of the ship had survived a typhoon off the coast of Japan. Jack had turned the experience into a short story which won a contest in San Francisco. Now he had the mother of all experiences to inspire stories. He set up a desk and began to write. He forged fictionalized tales from the true experiences of his time in Alaska and the Yukon. He wrote with a feverish urgency and his stories were timely and relevant. Readers who had not taken the plunge and rushed to the Yukon were hungry for stories about those who had. In January 1899, six months after returning home sick and broke, Jack sold his first short story to a magazine for $5. It was called to the man on the Trail. The sale was a spark that immediately lit a fire. That year he wrote seven more stories. Each one earned better placement in magazines and paid him higher wages.
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Jack wrote of the struggles on the
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Chilkoot Trail, the climb up to the summit of Chilkoot Pass, the wild river passage through the White Horse rapids, and
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the brutal winter which nearly took his life. He he became the underdog whom readers
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wanted to cheer for.
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And the effort worked.
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After a year of physical and mental punishment in the Klondike Gold Rush, he had returned home sick and penniless. After 18 months at a desk as a writer, he was earning steady money and supporting his family. Over the course of his life, Jack London wrote more than 50 books, the most famous of which were the Call of the Wild in 1903, the Sea Wolf in 1904 and White Fang in 1906. In the end, he amassed a fortune that was probably far larger than he would have pulled from a stream in the Yukon. Though of course the fortune and the experience in the Yukon were inextricably linked.
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And while Jack London built a new life for himself as a writer, the
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Chris Wimmer
Klondike Gold Rush continued far to the
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north in the unforgiving territories of Alaska and the Yukon.
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Chris Wimmer
The Palm Sunday avalanche in April 1898 doomed the Chilkoot Trail. There were two trails over the coast mountains, but the Chilkoot was the more well known because of the Golden Stairs and then the more notorious after the Avalanche. It was also more popular in the early days of the Gold Rush because it was 12 miles shorter than the other trail.
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But the trade off was that it
- [35:41]
Chris Wimmer
featured the more difficult climb up to the summit of Chilkut Pass. The other trail was the White Pass Trail. Which started at the town of Skagway. It led up to a summit called White Pass in the Coast Mountains. The climb wasn't nearly as steep as the trek up Chilkoot Pass, and that gave stampeders a choice. They could take the easier but longer route from Skagway to White Pass, or they could take the harder but shorter route from Dyee to Chilcote Pass. Both trails led down to Lake Lindemann and Lake Bennett for the next leg of the journey, and both left stampeders with a sense of buyer's remorse.
- [36:21]
Narrator
A journalist named Tappan Adney, who wrote for Harper's Weekly, said, whichever trail you took, you wished you had taken the other. A stampeder put it in more colorful and ominous language, there ain't no choice.
- [36:34]
Chris Wimmer
One's hell and the other damnation. After the Palm Sunday Avalanche, the choice was essentially gone. Nearly all activity shifted from the Chilkoot Trail to the White Pass Trail and from Dyea to Skagway. Dye started a speedy decline. Within five years of Jack London returning home, there were only six or seven people living in the ruins of the old ramshackle town. But in the summer of 1898, while
- [37:02]
Narrator
Jack recovered at home home in Oakland,
- [37:04]
Chris Wimmer
the Klondike Gold Rush was still rolling. And that was plenty of time for swindlers of every type and description, as well as a few legitimate business owners to set up shop in towns in Alaska to try to relieve the lucky gold miners of their recently acquired fortunes.
- [37:30]
Narrator
Next time on Legends of the Old West.
- [37:32]
Chris Wimmer
The Gold Rush rages for one more year as Skagway becomes a notorious boom town.
- [37:38]
Narrator
And then a tiny village up north
- [37:40]
Chris Wimmer
changes everything almost overnight. Thousands rush to Alaska's northern coast, including legendary lawman Wyatt Earp and his wife Josephine. That's next week on the final episode of the Klondike Gold Rush miniseries here on Legends of the Old west.
- [38:16]
Narrator
To binge all the episodes of a new season and to listen to every
- [38:19]
Chris Wimmer
episode of the podcast with no commercials. Subscribe in Apple Podcasts or sign up through the link in the Show Notes or on our website blackberrymedia.com this series was researched and written by Mandy Wimmer. Additional research and writing by me, Chris Wimmer Original music by Rob Valiere. Thanks for listening.
- [38:47]
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