I BECOME A STEAMBOAT DECKHAND

On the seventh day I reached the big river 30 miles below Fort Yukon. Facing the glaring white snow in the sunshine brought on a mild case of snow blindness and by the time I reached the river, my eyes were of almost no use to me. Snow blindness feels as though one's eyes are full of hot sand.

One must use pine boughs or something colored in front of the eyes in order to see at all.

The trail ran angling over to the opposite side of the river. Following it I came to a woodchopper's cabin. When I arrived they could not see whether it was a white man or an Indian because of the way I had my face covered with pine boughs stuck under the front of my cap. Many a man had to camp all day and travel only at night when he had a severe case of snow blindness. A musher is always welcome at a woodcutter's cabin, as he can give the latest news of the trail.

These men were cutting cordwood to sell to the steamboats during the summer months. Some of them had a good trade, getting $10, $12, $15 and as high as $20 a cord for their wood.

Of course, in the Yukon flats they had to take their chances in locating a wood camp, at a point that would be on the steamboat channel the next summer. In the spring breakup the ice will jam at the head of an island and overflow into some dead channel. The ice turning through this new passage would create a new deep waterway, leading off two or three miles from the old boat channel, leaving a pile of 200 or 300 cords of wood a couple of miles back from the water highway.

The river cut a new channel a few years after Fort Yukon was built, making the main boat channel from upriver almost a mile away. The boats get up to the post by a dead channel from below, and then have to pull downstream again for five miles to meet the main river.

After spending a day with the woodcutters, getting my hair and beard reduced to respectable proportions, I mushed up to the Fort. You may be sure my arrival there created some interest, after being on a prospect tour all winter up in a new country, as there are always plenty of men hanging around camps just waiting to stampede to a new location or gold strike.

The next day after my arrival I got a job as "Shavins" in a steamboat, the John Healy. ("Chips" is the ship's carpenter, and "Shavins" is his helper.) Here I had my first stove-cooked square meal in six months. The ship's cook outdid himself in preparing wholesome grub for the hungry crew. And I was most hungry of the crew, for a week after arriving off the trail of over 1,400 miles.

This boat was headed upriver for the Klondike the fall before, but had to pull into winter quarters here. They unloaded 70 tons of flour and canned goods at the post, then went. into a dead channel and froze in.

During the two months after my arrival they were still locked in the ice. The boat had to be painted and all repaired ready for another season's grind up and down the river. Up to the time I came, it had been so cold all winter that the crew just hugged the stoves. It kept half the crew cutting and hauling in wood to keep them warm.

As it neared spring, during the evenings around the stove, the crew began to steer up and talk. There were four or five old saltwater sailors, real old tars, who could spin interesting yarns. One of them was a man of 60 years, Johnny Owens by name, who had been a cabin boy on a slave ship, "black birding" he called it, in the South Seas. They used to bribe a tribal chief to get them a few hundred natives from some other tribe, chain them below decks, sail to Asiatic ports and sell them. Some of these sailors had spent a few seasons on whaling ships in the Arctic Ocean. They too had tough yarns to tell of life on a whaler, with a mixed crew of wharf rats of Italians, Portuguese, Spanish and Mexicans, to whom a knife was always the main point of such an argument. Such was the life of those professional sailors. Each was trying to get to the Klondike and get rich so they could leave the sea and settle down in a cottage with a piece of land until the lure of the sea coaxed them back again. By this time the daylight had lengthened so that after supper we yet had ample of hours of twilight. The Post Indians would come up to visit with us while we were off duty. The captain, chief mate and chief engineer would sit upstairs in their cabin and sing with an old phonograph they had. It was a machine that had a reproducer on it. The thought occurred to that it would be fun to have the Indians see "the machine that talks." I went and interviewed the captain and invited everybody, Indians and all, up to the main cabin. After we were seated he wound up the little box, while we white men watched the Indians' faces. When the captain turned on the music it almost started a panic. The Indians looked at us with frightened faces at first, then began to calm down as their fears of ghost talk faded and they began to realize that a joke was being played on them by the white man. They came to examine and walk all around the phonograph, intently watching it producing music, yet not believing that music and the human vice could come out of a box.

The captain thought that to convince them he would have to reproduce their voices, so he rigged up the reproducer and started it. At the same time he called the big chief up close and began talking to him, asking questions so the Indian's voice was recorded.

Then he reproduced the conversation. All Indians heard the questions and answers--then heard them come out of that box. The old chief's eyes bulged as he stood at the box and listened to his . voice. To them it was just another unsolved mystery that the white man had introduced into their primitive lives. When the captain dismissed them it did take long for 30 scared Indians to go through a single doorway and set foot on land again. Just before the river broke up, the mail of the winter arrived from outside by dog team. It was the second batch that had started from the head of the river. The first mail packet was lost through the ice in an open waterhole during a heavy blizzard, for mail has to go regardless of the weather.

It was two months after I went to work before the boat cleared of the ice backed down to the post to load up. We loaded the cargo and food for the boilers. The type of power on these rivers is similar to that used on the common steamboat except that the fire is twice as large and will hold nearly a half-cord of four-foot wood at a time. And how they do eat up the fuel while going upstream! We went back downriver to get into the main channel.

Circle City is 75 miles up the river from Fort Yukon, the most exciting and interesting 75 miles I ever rode. The river was nearly full of drifting ice coming down with a swift current, while we were trying to go up, dodging here and there, trying to get through between huge chunks of ice, sometimes striking a chunk as big as an acre head-on. If we were not holding onto something, the jolt we got would send everyone sprawling on the deck and tip over the woodpile. Sometimes we could not get past the ice pack and would be taken back downriver a few miles before getting out of the mess.

GOLD DIGGINGS AT LAST

The prow of the boat was extra reinforced and the big stern paddle wheel was ironed for protection from the ice and driftwood that were coming down the river. The captain wanted to get into Dawson first in the spring with a cargo of goods, as the prices there were sky high.

We finally reached Circle City, after stopping to take on wood four or five times, 16 cords at a time. This had to be packed on our necks, from 100 to 200 feet offshore and there were only eight of us deckhands to pack it.

Circle City was then the outlet camp for the Birch Creek and Mastodon diggings, where there were quite a number of placer mines, or what they call grubstake claims. Three of the old prospectors whose dog teams we had used going up the Chandalar River the fall before were old-timers in the country and each had a claim out on Birch Creek.

Circle City got its name in the early days when the fur traders had possession of that country, from being situated near the line of the Arctic Circle. But after the international surveyors were in there, they found that the line ran across just 32 miles south of Fort Yukon, leaving Circle City about 40 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

Before leaving Fort Yukon, the English missionary who had been located at that post since the early fur trading days, decided that his efforts toward making a pious community out of roughneck miners and adventurers was all in vain, and that he had better move to greener pastures over in Canada. He packed his household effects and moved everything, his family of seven orphan Indian kids, housekeeper and all, taking our steamer up to old Forty Mile Post, which is a mining town just inside of the Canadian line.

Forty Mile got its name before the present international boundary line was established. The town was just 40 miles on the Canadian side of the old or first boundary line. The creek or river that furnished the gold diggings for Forty Mile was originally all in Canadian territory, but the new survey cut off most of the mining and left it on the Alaska side.

This gold district was discovered several years before the Klondike. When the big gold strike was made in the latter place and government officials moved in, the miners on the upper Forty Mile River resented very much any interference with their right to pack a gun, or to shoot up the town occasionally. Or to pay a 15 percent royalty on gold mined, to the Canadian government, so they established a town of their own, just inside the American line and called it Eagle City.

Circle City had been established years before the big strike and was the headquarters for the mining and prospecting being done in the whole middle Yukon country. The four prospectors who owned the dogs that Joe and I used that past winter had mushed up the Yukon from Circle City to the Klondike River nine years before the big strike was made. They were working a rocker on some bar diggings over on the Indian River, and had mushed up over the famous Bonanza and Eldorado Creeks several times, while going to and from their diggings. They never dreaming that their trail was underlain with a foundation of gold, 10 to 20 feet under them.

We finally arrived at Dawson. When the boat's whistle blew from downriver, it brought every man, woman and dog down to the riverbank, because ours was the first boat into Dawson that spring with fresh canned goods. Most everyone on shore craved canned tomatoes and peaches. They had been so long without fruit juices that our boat, with its load of all kinds of canned goods, was surely a welcome sight.

After we got the cargo ashore, the boat prepared to pull downriver to St. Michaels for another load. The boat's officers had some difficulty in getting a new crew to go back, as nearly all the deckhands wanted to go mining. They were offered double pay for the round trip. "We came to dig gold, not to carry cordwood," was their reply.

That boat was doomed not to reach the sea in time to come up with another load that year. About 20 miles below Dawson she ran onto a sandbar while going full speed ahead downriver. She didn’t get off for nearly two months; the river kept dropping as fast as they could dig her out.

That is how I got into Dawson and the Klondike.

To be continued…

This story reprinted from the Spring, 1965 issue of Old West magazine, courtesy of Walt Bartoo... The portion here is the beginning of the second part, as it is quite long I decided to start here, in case there is not enough room to put all of it up.  Although the first part does not have anything about the goldfields in it, it is all very interesting stuff about the harrowing journey these young men had to the gold fields, so I hope to be able to post all of it here.

 Copyright 2000, all rights reserved

May 16, 2000
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