Gates of the Arctic Gaunt Beauty ... Tenuous Life Historic Resource Study for Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve

Even as the first explorers reported their findings, prospectors extended their quest toward the central Brooks Range. In fact, an old miner named Miller went up the Kobuk with Lieutenant Stoney in 1884, hired to chop wood for the steam launch. Wherever they stopped, Miller washed the sand of the stream bars looking for "color," the specks of fine gold that might lead to riches. He "...invariably found traces of precious metal" and begged Stoney to stake his further search, which Stoney could not do.¹ Lieutenant Allen associated with prospectors along the Yukon, rating them the most qualified men of the country for any wilderness enterprise. He had traveled with prospectors Bremner and Johnson from Copper River to Yukon. These two would follow Allen's tracks to the Koyukuk in 1887. Over the next few years a pattern emerged of single prospectors and scattered mining partners testing the streams and bars of the main Koyukuk and its South and Middle forks. A few small strikes were made, enough to keep a cadre of 20 or 30 men looking further.²

These men and the traders who staked and supplied them operated initially from Yukon River stations and, as best the record indicates, held mainly to the Koyukuk drainage, leaving the other rivers of the region to later waves of prospectors. Blessed with river transport to bring tools and supplies, a tight community of knowledgeable men thus came together on the far margin of the Yukon gold fields. They were mainly old hands, veterans of Sierras and Rockies. Some had pioneered the early placers on the upper Yukon, beginning in the 1870s. These were the rugged scouts in ceaseless search of gold. They prowled the far creeks and in time found paystreaks that spurred inexperienced hopefuls to actual and rumored fields of gold.³

Typical of these hardy men was James Bender, who died in 1932 in Fairbanks. Sourdough Historian Joseph Ulmer sketched Bender's life for the pioneers of Alaska: Bender's family, originally from Germany, followed a hundred-year course westward from Pennsylvania to Minnesota, whence James joined the Union Pacific Railroad construction as a wagon boss. He then hauled supplies to gold camps in Montana, became a deputy marshal, and later joined the rush to the Little Rockies in Montana. In 1887 he and 13 others crossed Chilkoot Pass and went down the Yukon to Fortymile River, where he hooked up with Al Mayo and floated down to Nuklukayet. There he met John Bremner and Pete Johnson, Lieutenant Allen's former partners. In the fall of '87 the three of them went overland to the mouth of John River on the Koyukuk. Next spring they whipsawed lumber for a boat and ascended the John, working the bars that summer and taking out fair pay. Bender and Johnson returned to Mayo's Landing (Tanana) while Bremner continued prospecting along the Koyukuk. On his way out, an Indian killed him. A messenger from Nulato brought the news to the miners, who were waiting for the last boat upriver. A miner's meeting was called and Gordon Bettles was chosen as judge, Jim Bender as marshal. Numbering more than 20 men, they commandeered a river steamer and proceeded up the Koyukuk to apprehend the murderer, who after being tried by a jury was executed by hanging. Later, trader Jack McQuesten outfitted Bender and he mined for a number of years in the Circle District, finally settling in Fairbanks. Ulmer concludes: "He was an outstanding figure of that type of real frontiers men. ..."⁴

Here in one life--and the places, people, and pursuits it knew--is a microcosm of that Yukon River decade before the Klondike Rush.

Capt. Billie Moore, son of the Capt. William Moore of Skagway and White Pass fame, was another Koyukuk pioneer. He had come down the Yukon from Fortymile to Nuklukayet at the same time Jim Bender did. With Bender and Bettles, he joined the avenging posse, serving as engineer of the commandeered steamer Explorer on the cruise up the Koyukuk to find John Bremner's killer. After the hanging, he went to St. Michael and sailed for Juneau. There he helped his father build a 20-ton schooner. Then, in the summer of 1889, he came back to the Yukon via Chilkoot Pass. After mining for 3 years in the Fortymile and Seventymile country, near the Canadian border, Moore and a partner gave it up, because "...the bar didn't pan out as well as we expected." In later years, in an application for an Alaska Pioneers' allowance, he told what happened next:

1892

I went over to St. Michael and met G.C. Bettles. We went into partnership. I went to Golovin Bay and brought a small stern wheel steamer to St. Michael and towed a small barge with trading goods up the Yukon, thence 300 miles up the Koyukuk River where I built a house and started trading. Bettles went up to Nuklukayet, which post he had acquired after [the trader] Walker's death.

1893

As soon as river broke, I moved up and built Arctic City. [E.] Chapman and [Johnny] Folger had struck coarse gold on a creek up the middle fork. Van Henricks, I, Folger and Chapman struck gold on a high bench which they named Tramway Bar. Bettles and I purchased half, buying out Chapman and Frank Hawley, paying them $2,000.00.

1894

Bettles went down with the steamer for supplies when the ice went out. I went up and dug a ditch from lake to bar, employing eight men to do so. We whipsawed lumber for sluice boxes, mined three weeks and found the pay streak pinch down as we went into the Bar. I gave it up, taking Howard, who had a felon on his finger, with me in my boat down to Nulato. I separated from Bettles. I wintered at mouth of Yukon.⁵

Capt. Billie Moore's early mining career on the Koyukuk ended in disappointment. But that did not stop him. He went on to many more years as master and pilot of Yukon River steamers, miner, fisherman, and trader. In old age he finally consented to the pleadings of his friends and left St. Michael for the Pioneers' Home in Sitka. His work as Gordon Bettles's partner on the Koyukuk was part of the slow creep up that river. Their little 35-foot, open-hold steamer Cora and the building of Arctic City some 400 river-miles up the Koyukuk provided an advanced base for miners, who built their own cabins there so they could overwinter. Indians of near villages began trading furs, forcing Moore and Bettles to give them the same prices as prevailed on the Yukon. Thus Arctic City became the prototype of the typical upriver post, with a trader, miners, Indian trappers and hunters, and a small river steamer to keep them all supplied. The 150-mile leap upriver from Arctic City to Tramway Bar on the Middle Fork had been strongly aided by Cora's supplies in 1892-93. All of this set the stage for further advances by trader Gordon Bettles. As more miners heard the news of upper Koyukuk strikes, a perceptible momentum--well short of a rush, but promising--began to gather. Bettles would read the signs and put his chips on the Koyukuk, shifting his trading operations ever farther up that stream. The frame was building for the next stage of Koyukuk history.⁶

Depending on which generation of old timers was talking or writing, Gordon Bettles was the father or grandfather of the Koyukuk mining district. Nor, with good reason, was he loath to accept this tribute. As a trader with mining interests in a remote, underpopulated region (he claimed that when he arrived in 1888 there were only 17 white men on the Yukon between St. Michael and Fortymile), he became a skilled promoter of the region's prospects. In 1893, with George T. Howard, earlier the printer of the St. James Mission (Tanana) press, Bettles set up the Yukon Press at Fort Adams, 6 miles down the Yukon from present Tanana. "The Remotest Periodical from Civilization," as it was subtitled, with its first issue of January 1, 1894, began the printed call that echoed ceaselessly down the decades for better transportation and communication with the States, including mail to the Interior stations at least once each winter--as a government responsibility, not dependent on the good graces of the Alaska Commercial Company. Bettles was well suited to his varied work, having trained as typesetter and newspaperman in Ontario and Detroit, having mined throughout the west, British Columbia, and Juneau before coming to the Yukon. He sealed his ties with the country by marrying Sophie, the daughter of Gregory Kokerine, a Russian trader at the Nowikaket Station on the Yukon.⁷

The Yukon Press provides a running commentary on the development of the Yukon corridor, together with reflections on the larger prospects and problems of the country. In the first issue, Bettles, who wrote most of the copy, traced the miners' progress up the Koyukuk through 1893, including the Tramway Bar strike. He stated that 22 miners were on the Koyukuk and 6 more were wintering at Tanana Station. He concluded with a caution: The Koyukuk looks promising, but it is not a place of easy riches. Thorough prospecting and development must precede mining. Be prepared to overwinter before any chance of pay.

One story, about Christmas at Al Mayo's Tanana Trading Station, told of separate religious services conducted for Indians and whites by Rev. J.L. Prevost of St. James Mission. It described a sumptuous dinner and an evening of singing followed by "quaint and original stories" by Al Mayo. Attendees included Mr. and Mrs. Bettles from Koyukuk, the Reverend Prevost and G.T. Howard from Fort Adams, and a 4-man contingent from Fortymile.

Advertisements give a sense of quickening pace along the river:

G.C. Bettles & Co.
Arctic City, Alaska
Miners Goods
"From a Pickaxe to a Candle"
Highest Prices Paid for Furs and Gold Dust

*****

The A.C. Co. steamers Arctic and Yukon will carry passengers and freight to all points on the Yukon.

Henry Newmann, Agent
St. Michael

A.C. Co. and independent traders along the river include Al Mayo at Tanana Station: T.H. Beaumont, A.C. Co. agent at Fort Yukon: L.N. (Jack) McQuesten at Fortymile; and A. Harper at Fort Selkirk, catering to Lewis River [upper Yukon] miners.⁸ The A.C. Co. competitor, North American Transportation & Trading Co., advertises its trading stations at Circle City, St. Michael, Kotzebue Sound, and Fort Weare (near Tanana).⁹

In the January 1, 1896 issue, Gorden Bettles editorialized on the "Downfall of the Indians and Eskimos." First of the evils is liquor, supplied by the whalers. The Native is dragged down by this addiction and does not hear "the childrens' cry for food." Endless gambling with cards means loss of outfit, dogs, and everything. Then they don't hunt and fish, and they starve in winter.

When the Revenue Cutters prevent the smuggling of kegs of whiskey cached in Siberia, unscrupulous whalers and traders provide raw goods so the Natives can make home brew--with devastating results. Here Bettles pays tribute to Capt. M.A. Healy for trying to control the booze traffic.

Next Bettles castigates the salmon canneries established at river mouths, which destroy Native food supplies. The history of fished out rivers along the Pacific Coast, writes Bettles, shows the future if this practice is not stopped.

Next he takes a shot at missionary Sheldon Jackson, whose introduction of reindeer to relieve the starving Natives is characterized as a flawed plan: "... it may be as hard to turn these born hunters into the comparatively tame vocation of herding deer, as it was to make a farmer of the Sioux and Apache."

He urges good breech-loading rifles for the Natives so they can effectively hunt the reduced game. And he states that it would be better to let legitimate traders supply them than to continue firearm prohibitions that open the trade to those evil traders who wipe the Natives out with liquor.

He concludes that the Natives of these lands need at least some of the protections granted their brethren in the States.¹⁰

Altogether, this is an enlightened plea for justice and protection of people undergoing great stress. It might be added: "particularly in the light of the times." But the qualification is unjustified. Many intelligent people of the late 19th Century, in Alaska and in the States, had allied themselves with the objectives of Indian Policy reform. Of people thus oriented, some who dealt with Native people day-by-day on a practical basis had acquired more profound cultural sensitivities than those possessed by idealistic reformers removed from the shocks of culture contact. Bettles seems to have been one who informed his principles with pragmatics, based on direct experience.

In that same January 1, 1896, issue it is reported that recent gold excitements at Birch and Munook (Minook) creeks, up the Yukon, have drawn miners away from the Koyukuk, partly because of easier steamboat access at these near-Yukon sites. Bettles is not discouraged. The $20,000 in gold already taken out of the Koyukuk bodes well for future exploration.

Bettles' editorial in June 1896 cites compelling reasons for optimism:

• 5 years ago only 200 tons of freight came into the Yukon Valley; last summer 2,000 tons were freighted to the upper Yukon.
  
• 4 years ago, one large steamboat could supply the whole river with two trips; today there are three larger boats, each making three trips a season, and still the lower river is not fully supplied.
  
• 4 years ago there were hardly 200 white men in the country; now 2,000 are here, brought by the placer diggings; quartz or hardrock mining has not started yet, but in time capital must awake to opportunity.
  
• The latest wave has brought women and children, pioneer families, repositories of values, progress, devotion and loyalty; compare these courageous families to the chronic grumblers who want to get rich quick and get out.
  
• Finally, Bettles notes that they have raised a school in Circle City and the government has appointed a teacher, the first nondenominational school in the region, which Bettles strongly approves. Circle City also has a post office, another first. Bettles concludes that it is time to rid the country of evil elements and get on with the work at hand.

In the same issue, eight steamboats are noted, mostly undergoing refitting and lengthening to carry the burgeoning trade. Captain Moore, Bettles' old partner, made five trips up the river in Arctic last year, a record.

The next two issues of the Yukon Press record the initial effects of the Klondike discovery in Canada's Yukon. Klondike fever would first drain the mid-Yukon and Koyukuk country, then create a back-surge of disappointed miners seeking claims in Alaskan gold fields. By the fall of 1897 the rush of miners already in the country, plus the early waves of stampeders from the outside world had already glutted the Klondike with thousands more claimants than there were claims available. An estimated 6,000 Argonauts now centered on the upper Yukon--at Dawson and the Klondike itself, or marooned at river stations such as Circle and Fort Yukon. The riverboat transportation system, beset by the short open-water season and the business-as-usual distribution of food supplies to competing trading stations proved unable to match people and food. Chaos threatened. Adding to the clamor was the imposition of restrictive Canadian law--relating both to mining claims and royalties, and to the stern enforcement of law and order by the Mounties. Out of the Klondike's combination of too many people and too few claims, Canadian restrictions, and the breakdown of transportation and supplies would be fashioned the overflow stampeders to the Koyukuk and the Kobuk in the summer of 1898.¹¹

By the late winter of 1898, the migration of stampeders from Canada's Klondike to Alaska was already underway. Army Capt. Patrick Henry Ray, exiting the upper Yukon after a reconnaissance to check conditions in the gold fields, met "...fully 300 people going down the river [from Dawson], and the general answers to my questions were, they were going to Alaska to stay." By this time, transfer of foodstuffs to areas of need had averted the immediate threat of starvation. But the deluge of stampeders poised on the upper river and lakes, and at Skagway and Dyea just below the passes, disturbed him greatly. He estimated that nearly 18,000 people would flood the Yukon country as soon as the river broke. They would be reasonably well supplied because the Canadians required them to haul a year's supply of food across the passes. But what would happen when they got to the Klondike and found nothing for them there? They would flood on down the river into Alaska, which "...is without any semblance of law, civil or military." To avert anarchy, Ray urged that military posts be established at the mouth of Mission Creek (where overflow miners were already building Eagle City), at the mouth of the Tanana, and at St. Michael.¹²

Already, in the fall of 1897, armed parties of miners had commandeered food from river steamers. By December, dogs for winter travel had become rare and valuable commodities. Inflationary prices for food, climbing rapidly with demand, would keep climbing as the flood of people gained volume. Scurvy, product of a beans, bacon, and flour diet, had struck down miners in the Klondike. The prospect loomed of a horde of unemployed stampeders--armed, dangerous, and desperate--roaming the country in predatory packs gleaning the last scraps of food, ultimately dying of starvation, scurvy, and cold.¹³

Captain Ray and his Canadian counterparts in the Mounted Police agreed that speculators and transportation companies had conspired to broadcast to the world an endless bonanza in the Klondike. Thus lured, the unwary and inexperienced came in droves to buy worthless claims. True, the operating mines at Minook Creek, Birch Creek, and Fortymile, and the promising prospects along the Tanana and Koyukuk showed that gold was available in Alaska--but only in limited amounts, far from supply points, where the cost of food would prohibit more than a few miners to survive, much less make a living. Only deliberate development of the country, based on roads and trails to the remote gold fields, could assure orderly progress in Alaska. To this end, Ray proposed roads to the Interior from Seward, one of them north to the Koyukuk.¹⁴

This was the atmosphere as spring turned to summer in 1898. The waves of people bound for the Klondike crested at this time. Those camped on the lakes at the head of the Yukon rafted and boated down the river to Dawson as soon as breakup allowed. More and more gold seekers landed at Skagway and Dyea, then funneled through the passes. All were too late for good claims. Other parties came by ocean steamer to St. Michael, then took passage on the scores of river steamers now plying the Yukon. Some of these took heed of rumors and of direct word from disappointed Klondikers floating down the river; the Klondike is filled up. As the word spread, some adventurers--not to be denied their adventure--looked to other fields, for they meant to strike it rich even if it did take all summer. Both Koyukuk and Kobuk figured in the search for alternatives.

Thus did the Klondike overflow evolve. In part it was made up of people who had physically got to Dawson and experienced the welter of crowded frustration there; in part it recruited newcomers en route to the Klondike who branched off to the Koyukuk and other fields from the Yukon River, or reset their objectives while still at sea. Some of these latter would go directly to Kotzebue Sound to test the rumored wealth of the Kobuk.

In the main, these stampeders knew almost nothing of the country nor of prospecting and mining. They were hopeful innocents, recruited from every occupation and walk of life in the States and many other countries. For economic or family reasons, prodded by intangible yearnings, they had taken the leap to adventure promised by the Gold Rush. With few exceptions they were ill-equipped physically and mentally for wilderness life. Too numerous for the slim pickings of the upper rivers, and unprepared for the winter rigors of arctic Alaska, they nevertheless entered the country with high spirits.¹⁵

Gordon Bettles, meanwhile, kept track of events through association with traders and steamboat men along the Yukon. The progress of prospecting on the Koyukuk boded well for that district, just as the Klondike overflow picked up stride. In 1898, with discovery of gold in paying quantities at Bergman--a few miles up the Koyukuk from Arctic City--Bettles established another trading post or "beanshop" at that location. "And when the news of this strike became general knowledge throughout Alaska via the mukluk telegraph and reached the States a real stampede was on.  

So I ordered enough supplies for a camp of about 1000 men....But I was hardly prepared for the tremendous gold rush that developed. Bergman was established at the head of navigation, but was on low ground and as a result was flooded out. So I opened another beanshop a few miles farther up the Koyukuk and called it Bettles.

I can't tell you how astonished I was that summer when I saw a constant procession of river steamers chuffing up the Yukon and heading up the Koyukuk. Most of these steamers came knocked down from Seattle and were re-assembled at St. Michael and all were loaded to the danger line with stampeders and their supplies. Some of the smallest were able to ascend the Koyukuk a few miles above Bettles, but most of them were stranded down the river.

Then Satan or somebody pulled one of those dangerous tricks out of the bag--the kind that has given the Koyukuk a very bad name. A sudden freeze occurred almost overnight, and sixty-eight steamers were frozen in solid for the long cold winter. There were nine hundred persons on these sixty-eight steamers, and when these adventurers realized that they would have to remain a whole year in this desolate part of Alaska, five hundred and fifty of them took emergency rations and mushed out to the Yukon. A good many went downstream to St. Michael, vowing never again to visit such an inhospitable country.

Those who stayed in and around Bettles numbered three hundred fifty stampeders, and I assure you we had quite an interesting winter with such a varied assortment of men in camp. However, most of them were broke. But with the supplies they had on the sixty-eight ships and the two hundred fifty tons of provisions we had, none went hungry that winter. Before spring I had to carry the camp on my books to the extent of just about an even $100,000.¹⁶

The stories of these overwintering 1898-99 stampeders and the camps they built survive in the diaries and letters of the participants. For most of them, people and camps alike, it was a one-winter stand. Probably 90 percent of the people departed in the spring without once looking back at the scenes of their suffering. The camps or "cities" on the Alatna and the Middle and South forks "...were mostly clearings in the woods along the riverbanks, with a few shacks, a sawmill, and a steamboat. Almost all of them were abandoned in less than a year." There were bright spots in the gloom. "Arctic City had electric lights, which glistened through the darkness during the long arctic winter." Bergman boasted a rough nightlife of whiskey drinking, fighting, wrestling, "shooting out the lights, and also shooting the cabin full of holes." Peavy had a schoolhouse and a platted townsite with named and numbered avenues. Little remains of these places, or the others--Union City, Jimtown, Beaver City, Soo City--except for a few ground depressions and rotted sill logs.¹⁷

An early historian of the Koyukuk recalled seeing "...here and there along the river banks...the bleaching bones of little steamers which once formed a part of the gallant fleet which bore the first stampeders to the Koyukuk."¹⁸

Despite hardships and, for most, failure--as measured by bags of gold--the Koyukuk stampeders speak in their diaries and letters of other, rarer values found in the far north of darkness and perpetually frozen ground. Hamlin Garland, a "Ninety-Eighter" himself, touched on the force that moved so many:

I believed that I was about to see and take part in a most picturesque and impressive movement across the wilderness. I believed it to be the last great march of the kind which could ever come in America, so rapidly were the wild places being settled up. I wished, therefore, to take part in the tramp of the goldseekers, to be one of them, to record their deeds.¹⁹

Typical of this breed of gold seekers were the members of the Iowa Company, who would prospect and mine for small returns on a midcourse tributary of the Koyukuk during the 1898-99 rush. This large company hauled tons of machinery and supplies over White Pass. On the shore of Tagish Lake they built two boats, the 60-foot sternwheeler Iowa and the smaller, screw-driven Little Jim. At breakup in June, they, with thousands of others (Pierre Berton estimates 30,000 people and 7,000 boats), descended through the Yukon's canyons and rapids to Dawson. After visiting the mines of Bonanza and Eldorado creeks, where he saw a fortune in nuggets and fine gold, E.G. Abbott of the Iowa's declared: "This district is all taken and no chance to locate anything within sixty miles." With rumors of fraud and fakery abounding, he yet could say, "We hear nothing but good reports from the Koyukuk country [where we will go] to try and find the elephant ourselves ..."²⁰

Another member of the party described conditions in Dawson:

You never saw so many heartbroken, discontented people as there are here. No work at any price and no money nor anyway of earning it. Wages are $10 per day, but you can't get a day's work at any price. It costs nearly $10 a day to live.

It is a shame for people to rush in here the way they are. Men here are doing everything they can to get out. You ought to hear their tales of woe; it is heart rending. I am glad we have some other place in view. We still think we will find the Eldorado. Everyone we see who has been on the Koyukuk river says it is good and we are sure to hit it.²¹

This optimism was ill-founded. The Koyukuk enterprise of the Iowa Company ended up "a dead failure," stuck on a fine-gold creek that could not pay with the crude mining techniques of that day. But the Iowa's had planned as well and persevered as strongly as they could. One of their members, Mrs. Jesse Thomas was among the first white women to overwinter on the Koyukuk.²²

By far, the majority of Koyukuk stampeders came by ocean transport to St. Michael, thence by steamboat up the Yukon, and then, by a variety of river craft, or overland, up the Koyukuk. St. Michael became a caldron of activity, full of rumors, competing shippers, mountains of freight and miners' outfits, and thousands of goldseekers, off-loaded from ocean ships, clamoring for riverboat passage up the Yukon. Thousands more of the disappointed from Dawson, most of them broke and desperate, fought for passage home on the returning steamers. The presence of this fleeing army, the stories they told of dispossession and despair in the Klondike, steered many newcomers to the Koyukuk.

Capt. W. P. Richardson, Captain Ray's lieutenant in 1897, witnessed the churning scene. He renewed the call for temporary military government on the Yukon: to protect life and property; to regulate the illegitimate phase of commerce that preyed on innocents, both Native and white; and to avert the building pressure toward "those lawless and bloody days" that had marred the mining camps of the West.

He noted the increase of fly-by-night transportation companies with dishonest motives, and the cooperative companies of miners, most of them laboring under incapable management and insufficient means to accomplish their purposes. These enterprises:

...after giving birth to the most original and unique inventions in the way of river craft perhaps ever assembled in one harbor, came ultimately to grief and abandonment in nearly every instance ...²³

In most ways, the 1898-99 Koyukuk rush (and its contemporary on the Kobuk) was a repeat of a phenomenon patterned in earlier mining camps. The same varieties of characters assembled: the strong, the weak, the knowing, and the innocent. By far, most of them were decent people, though villainy was not entirely absent. Most of them came away with nothing, and in the Arctic gold fields the incidence of success was slimmer than usual.

Differences between this rush and others hinged partly on remoteness and climate. For all but the experienced and equipped there was no way out once winter closed. Moreover, the economic geology was marginal. To this day, placer mining in these above-the-Arctic Circle districts is a small-scale affair. In that day, with frozen-ground mining methods yet to be perfected and prospecting in these fields in its infancy, it was possible to find color, but rare to find a real paystreak and nearly impossible to develop and exploit it. Few of the stampeders came equipped for the years of patient labor that later miners lavished for occasional big pay, but usually modest returns. Remoteness and difficulty of access prohibited resupply and a second start for most novices--who had already liquidated all they once owned to get here in the first place. As get-rich-quick dreams went aglimmering with the disappearing sun, the dark, sub-zero winter demoralized all but a few. These factors in combination turned the rush around in a hurry; it became a nearly complete evacuation as soon as energy or breakup allowed. Many people went out during fall and early winter, at least as far as the Yukon. By June, with rivers clear of ice and in flood, most of the rest flooded out, too, riding the high water.

This ephemeral quest produced different kinds of heroes. Some just hung on tight, then left as soon as they could. Others, weak and homesick at first, hardened up and kept trying. Many, who did no mining (most of the novices gave up after an empty prospect hole or two), kept busy with camp chores or saw the country while hunting and ice-fishing, with occasional holiday parties. Sprinkled thinly through the few hundreds who got to the upper rivers and creeks were some tough, competent cases who went about their prospecting and mining with high energy and spirits, taking the cold and darkness and difficulty in stride. All of these varied folks, including a number who wandered off and froze to death and others who hunkered down in far cabins and watched the black-leg scurvy rot their bodies away, were, if not individually heroic, at least participants in a heroic venture.

Their own stories confirm these thoughts, and say them better.

Typical of the novices who started weak but gained strength from adversity, was a New York man named Charlie Miller. His diary-letters to his wife and children, and to his father, trace the journey to the gold fields from Seattle to St. Michael, then to sites along the Yukon, and finally the Koyukuk. His personal, gut response to the big, bad current of forces, people, and events, which he could not have foreseen when he left home, encapsulates the real world of the Gold Rush, devoid of the patina of romance later applied to it. And yet, his coping with this world, once caught in that current, restores the sense of a grand venture and vindicates the essentially romantic vision that moved both participants and later commentators. On the way, his fine-stroke descriptions of people and places lend detail to the broad outlines of history.²⁴

Hotel Stevens, Seattle, Wash., May 23, 1898

Dear Wife.

does this sound queer. but Dodie I can't tell you how terable it is to be away from you and the children. I feel too miserable to discribe the tripp on the train. dearest if I ever thought it would efect me so ...I would never gone away. I hope i'll be able to brace up in a few dayes....I could not tell enything about the Steamship... there was nothing sure of the ship sailing...a new company had the ship and all that had tickets were to go by 5 to 9 June. still there is nothing sure. but I be able to tell in a few days....[To survive until sailing, Charlie and his partner Gordon will go to work at a blacksmith shop at $2 per day.] This whole city of Seattle is nuthing but Klondike stores. it is a very tuff place.

from your loving husbin
Charlie

*****

May 28, 1898

...you write that [if] you had me home [you] would not let me go for all the Gold in the Klondike. I feel the same way. if I had only never Started for its something terable how home sick I am. I hope I will feel better if that dam Ship ever starts.

May 30, 1898

...the latest is now the Columbia is to sail 15 of June but it think she will never leave.

But Columbia is condemned, and they are assigned to a small "hulk" that they believe unseaworthy. Charlie's ticket money goes with default of the Columbia Co., $450 lost.