Gold Dust Days Were Rough on Chilkoot Trail

“Is that what I think it is, up there hanging from the pine tree?” I asked Scotty, our guide, as I caught up to him along the trail.

It wasn’t all that easy to catch up to Scotty even though his backpack was much heavier than mine. He moved right along with an easy, loping stride. Besides half of the cooking gear, he had two heavy bottles of Yukon Jack stowed away in the backpack.

He shaded his eyes and looked up in the pine tree at the whitened skeleton of a man.

“Yeah,” he nodded. “I have never seen him before.”

“Then you can’t introduce me. He’s sort of waving in the breeze, hanging up there from that limb.”

Scotty shrugged. The man, hanging from the pine over the trail, obviously had been dead for a long, long time.

We were in British Columbia, over the border from Alaska, about halfway between Skagway and Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, Canada. We were up a few thousand feet and heading west to intersect with the old Chilkoot Trail and the legendary 32 meanest miles in the world. I expected it to be primitive but not that primitive.

Unscheduled Stop

The Yukon and White Pass Railroad from Skagway had kindly dumped us off along the side of one of the mountain slopes near White Pass, Yukon Territory. Passengers craned their necks and gathered on the platforms of the famous narrow-gauge railway to see why the train had suddenly stopped in the middle of the pine forest.

We struggled into our unfamiliar backpacks beside the railroad track, hefting the loads cautiously. In my pack was the fuel stove plus seven loaves of bread that I had selected when loading up. The bread puffed up my pack over my head, but weighed less than many other loads although it looked enormous. We would be eating our way through this bread rapidly, with eight of us plus two guides on the trek.

Some of the train passengers waved and wished us well, but one shouted: “If you paid your fare, you wouldn’t be kicked off, you know that?”

We grinned and mugged a bit for the photos, but most of us were thinking about the bear warnings we had received. Those ungainly playful-looking Alaskan brown bears and grizzlies are anything but cordial and friendly. And this was berry season so they would all be out.

Already our original campsite at Bare Loon Lake was forbidden by Canadian Rangers, who sent warnings to our guides that we must pack in to Lake Lindeman tonight.

“Is that skeleton any part of the bear warnings that are out?” someone asked Scotty.

“I doubt it,” said Scotty easily. “Maybe someone’s idea of a joke. “Those old gold miners that came up this way, maybe he was one. I guess in ’98 and ’99 there were a lot of crude jokes, along with all the deaths and the terrible hardships. They were a rough lot, you know.”

Maybe they still are tough on this trail. I looked over our group. The family from Texas didn’t look like effete types, nor Bill and his wife from Ohio, both experienced backpackers. Randy, the other guide, was all muscle and bone, handy if the going got tough.

Gold Fever

I thought of “Soapy” Smith, one of the first old-time tough mining rascals of the ’98 Alaska Gold Rush days. Gold is what attracted all the adventurers in those days to pack in a ton of supplies, picks and shovels, and manhandle even boats up the steep mountain trail in the freezing cold of winter.

Boats would enable them to traverse the rapids from Lake Lindeman to Lake Bennett and then down the Yukon River to Whitehorse and Dawson to the fabled Klondike gold fields for instant fortunes--if they survived and were lucky.

Soapy Smith never did any gold digging directly. He stayed in Alaska digging gold from the miners right in Skagway, which was then and still is a pioneer, frontier town. The boardwalks are there and the mud is there and the saloons are there complete with dancing girls.

Soapy’s band of outlaw spies would fleece every prospector possible who came back with gold plus every wealthy would-be miner on his way up to the Yukon.

Big Shoot-Out

In 1898, when a man named Stewart was robbed of 15 ounces of gold, an angry town surveyor named Frank H. Reid and four others confronted Soapy. He came at them with a .45 caliber Winchester rifle. Reid recklessly wrested the rifle away from Smith but got shot in the stomach in the process; Reid managed to get two shots into Smith and killed him instantly on the town pier. Reid died a week later. They were buried side-by-side in Skagway, like bosom buddies.

We never did get an explanation of the skeleton swinging there not far from Bare Loon Lake, but it didn’t spoil our lunch, washed down with the clear icy-cold water from the lake. It was a beautiful spot but we packed up and trekked on down until we met the famous old Chilkoot Trail.

The Canadian Maple Leaf flag fluttered below us near the Lake Lindeman shore in the chilly breeze. It was hard to imagine a huge tent city of 25,000 people crowded down by the lake in 1898, all of them readying to go on to Whitehorse and down the Yukon River that flows north into Dawson and the Klondike gold fields.

Now there were only two tents for the Ranger headquarters, and a small log cabin near the lake.

“We lock all our food in the log cabin,” said Scotty. “And I mean all . Candy bars, cookies, peanuts, everything. Bears cannot see well but they sure can smell. They will, and have, ripped right through a pair of jeans to get at candy in the pocket, with someone still in the jeans.”

Bear Signs

As we packed down from the mountain to Lake Lindeman, a frayed rope was tied across the trail with a crayoned warning: “No camping or hiking after 6 p.m. beyond this point on account of the bears.”

The Canadian Ranger welcomed us to the area with a smile and repeated the warning: “Bears are bad this year. Tell your people not to even wipe their hands on their jeans with greasy-food fingers.” He advised Scotty, “Bears have gone right into the tent guided by smell, when they cannot break into the heavy log cabin.”

A few belts of Yukon Jack after a rough and tasty dinner cooked by Scotty and Randy made us feel brave again, enough to snuggle down in the tents and forget about the bears. We would have felt more secure with even half a bottle of Yukon Jack to either offer it, drink it, or smash the empty bottle across a bear’s nose if we had drunk enough. But the grog was all locked away in the cabin.

Full packs were hoisted in the morning after a sourdough pancake breakfast made by Randy along with hot coffee (no Yukon Jack), and we were off on the Chilkoot Trail. I urged the backpackers to eat more bread, but the pancakes left me with nearly a full load.

The Chilkoot Trail is a rough and rocky one, and a 32-mile living museum. Every few yards one sees a worn and patched old boot, a sledge, with the iron runners rusting and wooden oak frame rotting, or a part of a cast-iron stove or the weathered ribs of a boat.

Looking down the “staircase” of the 45-degree slope, up through White Pass on the Chilkoot Trail, I wondered how a miner could stagger up that rocky path with up to 65 pounds on his back. We slugged on and sweated, and kept an eye out for bears.

Picturesque Cemetery

Plenty of men didn’t make it in ’98 and ’99. Graves with wooden crosses so weathered that names and dates were mostly obliterated lie in a picturesque cemetery overlooking Lake Lindeman. All along the trail, deaths were common, either from fights or frost, pneumonia, murder or exposure.

Rugged women made the trail, too. One enterprising businessman packed in a bevy of “actresses” to relieve the boredom of the mining and relieve the miners of all that heavy gold to carry back to civilization.

Old Sweetwater Bill, a successful miner, used to drive a bunch of the dance hall girls to his claim and let them dig all the gold they wanted. He also found Gussie, said to be his special girl, dining with another man because, she said, “she liked eggs.” Sweetwater Bill bought up every egg in Dawson. He used up two large coffee cans of gold dust and nuggets to corner the egg market and become the biggest egg man in Alaska, or at least in Dawson.

These ’98 and ’99 sourdoughs had to build fires to thaw out the earth to dig with a pick, if they were tough enough to make it, carrying their ton of supplies, up the Chilkoot Trail, down the rapids to Lake Bennett, then down the Yukon River to Dawson and the Klondike.

Grim Remnants

We packed along, looking at the grim remnants of ’98 lying along the Chilkoot Trail. The view of the mountains, the smell of the pines, the open air were so great that we envied in a way those tough, fearless miners living their adventure in the Alaskan mountains.

After our Lake Lindeman return we got ready for the rapids passage into Lake Bennett. Dragging two rubber rafts from a cave in the hills and inflating them, we thought how the miners would have loved these modern craft, after their frail and cumbersome boats that they dragged or built on the spot to carry their gear and themselves through the white water.

“OK, you can stand up sometimes. You can only just take a quick photo,” Scotty told me reluctantly. “But when I say paddle right side, you better be paddling hard, or we’ll all be in the drink.”

Thoroughly Scared

I got slides of a lot of spray and realized how little I know of white-water rafting and river-water photography, and got thoroughly scared in the process. But I paddled out of sheer fright when Scotty yelled “Now!” He got us through as he always has and probably always will.

I take off my hat to these tough and fearless miners and the women of the old Klondike days, without proper gear and little knowledge, packing the rugged Chilkoot Trail. Whatever fame and gold they found, they earned it the hard way, and deserved every ounce of it.

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Mountain Travel offers a float-plane trip from Juneau to Skagway and then a four-day backpack hike over the Chilkoot Trail and float plane back to Juneau for $995. Contact them at 1398 Solano Ave., Albany, Calif. 94706, or phone (415) 527-8100.