Jason's Gold (17 page)

These few days were the happiest in his life, but more fleeting than a northern wildflower. Word came all too soon that
The Pride of the Yukon
had reached Fortymile and was expected in Dawson City within twenty-four hours.

There was time for one last triumphant show at the Palace Grand Theater. The line for tickets stretched three blocks long and around a corner, but Jason and his brothers didn't need tickets. They were seated in a special box with Big Alex McDonald, Joseph Ladue, and Edith Van Buren, the niece of the former President of the United States, who'd come upriver as a tourist and erected a lavish pavilion across the river from Dawson.

For the occasion, Homer had written a new poem, entitled “My Heart Remains in the Northland,” which
Jamie recited as their finale. Though Jamie's eyes seemed to encompass every Klondiker in the house, they came to rest on Jason for the last stanza:

With her last line of the season, Jamie threw up her hands in her inimitable fashion, and the audience rose, shouting “Bravo! Bravo!” and tossing bouquets of wildflowers onto the stage.

As
The Pride of the Yukon
's whistle blew the following morning and Jamie was about to board, she confided that she'd written that last stanza herself. “We'll be back for the summer season as surely as the swans and the geese,” she promised.

“And I'll be standing right here on the dock,” Jason told her.

“Who knows, maybe then we'll stay….”

“Who knows,” he repeated bravely. It seemed such a long, long time.

A few minutes later he watched
The Pride of the Yukon
disappear around the bend. So much was slipping away—Jamie and Charlie, Jack London, the trusting amber eyes of King, the chain of Klondikers ascending the Chilkoot….

Jason lifted his eyes to the mountains towering
above the Golden City. He'd come so far, and he'd made it.

He turned back to the sawmill and broke into a run. Everyone at the mill was racing to make the lumber for a new hotel. He was needed there.

Jason's Gold
goes back to my childhood in Alaska in the 1950s—my memories of the winter darkness and the northern lights and rusting gold dredges. In the three decades since, I've recited “The Cremation of Sam McGee” countless times around wilderness campfires and have felt the powerful pull of what its author, Robert W. Service, called “the Spell of the Yukon.”

In the midnineties I finally saw the settings of the fabled Klondike gold rush for myself, from Skagway, Alaska, to Dawson City, in Canada's Yukon Territory. I didn't know then that I would write a Klondike story, but as my wife, Jean, and I were hiking, rafting, and visiting museums, the jade green waters of the upper Yukon River were seeping into my subconscious, as were the personal histories of those who took part in what Canadian historian Pierre Berton calls “one of the
strangest mass movements in human history.” In 1997, stirred by the centennial celebrations taking place in the North, I was taken with the idea of going on the rush imaginatively, one hundred years later, while dramatizing it for my readers.

I am particularly indebted to Pierre Berton's extraordinary history,
Klondike—The Last Great Gold Rush
, first published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart in 1958. Another “gold mine” was
Chilkoot Trail
, by David Neufeld and Frank Norris (Lost Moose Publishers, 1996). It has a fine text, accompanied by numerous Eric Hegg photos of the rush. I would also point interested readers to
Women of the Klondike
, by Frances Backhouse (Whitecap Books, 1995); to
The Miners
, by Robert Wallace (Time/Life Books, 1976); and to
The Book of Jack London
, by Charmian London (Mills & Boon, 1921).

Many of the characters in
Jason's Gold
are actual historical figures. They include Soapy Smith, “Old Man” Tripp, “Reverend” Charles Bowers, “Slim Jim” Foster, Captain William Moore, Eric Hegg, Robert Henderson, George Washington Carmack, Skookum Jim, Tagish Charlie, Col. Sam Steele, Jacob Jackson, Joseph Ladue, Big Alex McDonald, Edith Van Buren—and, of course, Jack London, as well as his partners, Captain Shepard, Merritt Sloper, Fred Thompson, Jim Goodman, and the latecomer, Tarwater.

Twenty-one-year-old Jack London sailed from San Francisco on the
Umatilla
on July 25, 1897. He was grubstaked by his sister, Eliza, and her husband, sixty-year-old Captain Shepard, who was accompanying London. At Port Townsend, Washington, London and Shepard transferred to the
City of Topeka
, bound for Juneau. For the last leg they hired Indian canoes to take them to Dyea, as reported by Fred Thompson, who kept a diary.

London himself did not keep a journal of any kind, it seems, until he was floating out on a scow from Dawson City to the Pacific in June 1898. From his own accounts, it was only as he was leaving that he thought of turning his failed attempt to strike it rich into grist for his literary ambition. I have endeavored to portray Jack London's history as accurately as possible, down to the scarlet long underwear he wore while toting his one hundred and fifty-pound loads up the Chilkoot Pass on a sweltering day in late August. Jack disposed of Captain Shepard's outfit after the older man turned back, for health reasons, before ascending the pass. It occurred to me that in my novel, Jack London could convey his brother-in-law's outfit to my protagonist, who would be in need of one.

London and his partners launched their
Yukon Belle
onto Lake Lindeman on September 16, as in my story, and barely escaped ice-up on Lake Laberge. He was the steersman when his party ran Miles Canyon and the White Horse Rapids. That Jack London lingered to earn money by taking dozens of other boats through, as reported in some of the histories, is probably a myth. His wife and biographer, Charmian London, reports that he took one other boat through the rapids, and not for profit. London and his partners were in a deadly race to cover the next several hundred miles before ice-up and find winter quarters. A voracious reader, Jack London packed along books by the authors I mentioned. One of the volumes was
Das Kapital—
in addition to being an individualist, London was a passionate socialist. During the winter he borrowed Rudyard Kipling's
The Seven Seas
from someone; the record doesn't say who that was. Clear as day, I pictured my protagonist giving it to him.

Fictional characters in
Jason's Gold
include Jason
Hawthorn and his brothers, Abraham and Ethan; Mrs. Beal; Kid Barker; Charlie Maguire; and Jamie and Homer Dunavant. As the reader might guess, Homer Dunavant was inspired by Robert W. Service, though at the outbreak of the gold rush, Service was headed for Mexico, and wouldn't arrive in the Yukon until the next decade. Charlie Maguire is based on William Byrne, a teenager who froze his feet, had both legs amputated at the knees, and was abandoned by his uncle and others as they made a desperate upriver retreat from Dawson City in October 1897. Byrne survived the winter, alone, in a shack near Five Fingers.

The cabin where Jason and Charlie wintered in this story—also near Five Fingers—was a real cabin that had been occupied years before the rush by George Washington Carmack. His library there included issues of
Scientific American
.

Several of the elements of my story that might seem pure fiction are based closely on research. The two frozen men Jason encountered on the Little Salmon are based on an account of two corpses discovered on the upper Porcupine River, a far northern tributary of the Yukon. These men and many others died attempting one of the “back door” routes to the Klondike.

Jason's desperate struggle with the wounded moose, as well as the specifics of his den-hunting experience, are based on actual incidents. To this day, Athabaskan natives in Canada and Alaska still continue their ancient practice of hunting black bears in their dens. I learned that the depth of a bear's sleep, as well as its willingness to leave the den when roused, varies a great deal. I would recommend
Hunters of the Northern Forest
and
Make Prayers to the Raven
, by Richard Nelson (University of Chicago Press, 1973 and 1983, respectively).

I hope that some of my readers will want to discover the upper Yukon country for themselves. Dawson City today is a thriving year-round town of two thousand. Though a mother lode of gold was never found, small placer mining operations continue. Visitors might buy a nugget, but they come to marvel at the compelling and epic human drama that was played out there.

The Klondike gold rush, which began with Henderson's and Carmack's discoveries in late summer of 1896, continued through the summer of 1899. Of the approximately one hundred thousand people who set out for the Klondike, around forty thousand made it to Dawson City. Of those, only half are thought to have even looked for gold. Of those, only four thousand are thought to have found gold. Of the four thousand, only several hundred struck it rich.

Durango, Colorado
July 1998

From
Down the Yukon

It was ten minutes before noon when Jamie stowed the shotgun under the lashing that crisscrossed the oilskin tarp covering our gear. “All set,” she said, giving her wide-brimmed hat a good tug on her forehead. She'd braided her hair into a lively black rope that swung back and forth as she worked.

Abe and Ethan were watching, their eyes twinkling. The men on either side were equally entranced—we were wedged between two skiffs, each of which had two rowing stations. “What do you aim to do with that shotgun, miss?” a grizzled fellow asked her. “Blast your competitors?”

“If we run out of grub,” Jamie told him good-naturedly.

“Cannibals in the race, Harry. What is the world coming to?”

“How do you aim to cross the Norton Sound in that wee bucket?” called an Irishman from the skiff on the opposite side.

“We've got a balloon in our outfit,” I volunteered. “We aim to inflate it, tie on with the canoe, and fly to Nome. It's legal, I hear. You watch for us—we'll wave.”

There was laughter all around.

Jamie and I shook hands with my brothers. They wished us Godspeed. Burnt Paw seemed to know exactly what was going on, and was leaping around us like a jack-in-the-box. Anticipating the starting gun, I snatched up my paddle and made ready to board. Suddenly Burnt Paw launched himself into the canoe.

“I'd say he wants to go with you,” Ethan observed.

The men on either side were now seated in their rowing stations and poised for the gun. They barely cracked a grin at our foolishness.

I grabbed Burnt Paw and set him down on the bank. He immediately lifted the one paw up, with the wrist slack. “You be a good boy,” I said.

He whined and he whimpered.

“Take him with you for good luck,” Ethan insisted. “You never know when he might come in handy.”

“One minute!” a voice from upriver boomed.

I boarded and, keeping low, made for the bow. Standing in six inches of water in her gum boots, Jamie pushed off enough to float the canoe free. She stepped carefully into the stern; then we paddled a few strokes until we were abreast of the bows of the neighboring skiffs.

Jamie took a look around. She gave me a smile more golden than the midnight sun. “Take a deep breath, Jason.”

I heard Burnt Paw's shrill bark. I heard my brothers calling “Good luck!” and “Ho for Nome!” The starting gun went off, loud as a cannon.

Amid the shouts and the cheers and the splashing
of oars, it was pandemonium.

“Watch our smoke!” I yelled. “Nome or bust!”

Jamie and I started paddling in earnest, and our canoe shot forward. With a glance over my shoulder toward my brothers, as I freed a hand to give them a last wave, I saw Burnt Paw in the river. Waterworthy as any muskrat, he was paddling after us with all his might.

I stopped paddling, I was laughing so hard. “Jamie!” I cried. “Look behind us!”

Here came that mongrel, with only his black-and-white face above water, his ears hinged forward with determination. The shore was slipping away; my brothers were bent over laughing. We were about to be swept into the boils at the edge of the main current.

Jamie spun the canoe sideways so that Burnt Paw would have a wider target. I stowed my paddle and made the catch. “Down the Yukon!” Jamie shouted. “Three for Nome!”