The most famous photograph of the Klondike Gold Rush shows a white slope so steep it looks almost vertical, and cut into its face a thin black line of men. They climb single file up a staircase carved into the ice, hundreds of them, bent double under packs so heavy that each man’s boots nearly touch the head of the man below. The line does not stop. It does not thin out.
It runs up the mountain and over the top and out of the frame. Each of those men is carrying about fifty pounds. Each of them will climb that slope again and again, thirty or forty times, until he has dragged a literal ton of goods over the summit one load at a time on his own two legs. That was the Chilkoot Pass in the winter of 1897 and 1898.
And nobody was making that climb over and over because he had missed an easier way. There was no easier way. A government on the far side of that summit had done the arithmetic, and the arithmetic said one ton of supplies per person or you do not get in. So an ordinary man from Seattle or Chicago, a clerk, a farmer, a shopkeeper who had never carried a heavy pack in his life, had to move two thousand pounds of food and gear up a wall of ice in fifty-pound loads in the subarctic cold before he could even begin the real journey to the gold.
It started in August 1896, when a small party found coarse gold in the gravel of a creek deep in the northwest corner of Canada. They named the creek Bonanza. For almost a year, nobody outside knew. The Yukon in winter is sealed off from the world by ice and distance.
Then in July 1897, two steamships docked, one in San Francisco and one in Seattle, carrying miners who had come out of the Klondike with staggering amounts of gold. Suitcases of it. Coffee cans of it. The newspapers called it a ton of gold coming off the boat, and the word went across the country like a fever.
It landed on a nation in the middle of a brutal economic depression, where a great many people already had nothing to lose. Roughly a hundred thousand of them decided more or less at once to drop their lives and go north and get rich. The rich and the cautious could pay for the long way around, a sea voyage up the Alaskan coast and then a river route in. But that was slow and expensive, and there were nowhere near enough boats.
For everyone else, there was really only one way: sail up the inside coast to the head of a narrow ocean inlet, to raw tent towns at the foot of the coast mountains, and then climb over those mountains on foot, dragging everything you owned behind you. There were two ways over. From Skagway, you could take the White Pass, which was lower and gentler. Or from a town called Dyea, a few miles away, you could take the Chilkoot.
The Chilkoot was an old trail. The Tlingit people had carried trade goods over it for centuries before any prospector ever saw it. It ran about thirty-three miles from tidewater at Dyea up to Lake Bennett, just across the line into British Columbia, where the Yukon River truly begins. Thirty-three miles does not sound like much.
You could walk thirty-three flat miles in a long day. It took the average stampeder about three months. The rule came from Canada. On the Canadian side of that summit, the North-West Mounted Police had set up shop and watched the first wave of the rush with real alarm.
Dawson City, the boomtown at the goldfields, had nearly starved in the winter of 1897. It was hundreds of miles from anywhere, and it could not feed the flood of people pouring toward it. The Mounties made a decision that was cold and completely correct: they would not let anyone cross into Canada without enough supplies to survive a year alone. If you came to that border with less, you did not get in.
You went back down the mountain. A year of food worked out to around eleven hundred fifty pounds. Flour, bacon, beans, dried fruit, sugar, salt, coffee, the whole grim list calculated to keep one man alive through a subarctic winter. On top of the food, you needed the gear to live and to mine: a tent, a stove, blankets, tools, a whipsaw, nails, rope, cooking pots, a change of clothes.
That added up to close to another thousand. Put the food and gear together and you land right around two thousand pounds. One ton. The Mounties sat at the top of the pass with scales and weighed you.
A ton was the price of admission. Now consider the problem that creates. You have to get a ton of goods to the top of a mountain pass. You are one person, and the most you can carry up that slope on your back is about fifty pounds.
You do it by relay. You carry your fifty or seventy pounds up the trail as far as you can manage and set it down in a cache. Then you walk back down empty, shoulder the next load, and carry it up to the same cache. You do it again and again, leapfrogging your entire outfit forward in stages.
To move one ton over the pass, a man had to climb it thirty or forty times. Roughly thirty round trips added up to at least twenty-five hundred miles on your legs to advance your body and your goods a distance of thirty-three. You walked most of the width of the continent to cross a single mountain range. The men who were smart about it, or who simply had no choice, made the crossing in winter, because in winter the ground froze hard and the snow packed into a surface you could climb, and the terrible boulder fields near the top filled in and smoothed over.
Winter, with its dark and cold, was the good season on the Chilkoot. The men strung out along the trail in the photographs are climbing through snow on purpose. They slept in a chain of rough camps that grew up along the route, places with names like Canyon City and Sheep Camp, tent cities of exhausted people that appeared out of nothing and vanished a year later. Sheep Camp was the last real stop before the summit push, and the last place you could get firewood until you were eleven miles down the far side.
Above Sheep Camp, there were no trees. There was nothing but rock, snow, and the line of men. Theft was a constant terror. A stolen cache did not just mean lost property.
If someone took your food up here, you could die, and you certainly could not cross into Canada, because the Mounties would weigh you and turn you back. So men slept on their outfits. They marked and guarded and worried over piles of flour sacks in the snow while their strength drained away climbing. The whole trail was a slow-motion migration of goods creeping up the mountain in fifty-pound bites, watched over by people who were half dead from the effort of moving them.
Then you came to the last half mile, and the last half mile is the reason there is a famous photograph at all. The final climb to the summit was so steep you could not walk it upright. In summer it was a scramble over boulders. In winter it was a wall of snow and ice rising something like a thousand feet.
To get men and their packs up it, somebody cut steps. The steps were a business. Two men cut the first staircase into the ice with axes in a single night, then stood at the bottom and charged a toll to climb it. They took in more than eighty dollars a day, which in 1898 was a small fortune.
Other operators came and cut more steps and charged their own tolls. By the peak of the rush, there were around fifteen hundred steps carved into that ice, with a rope strung alongside as a handrail and little shelves cut into the side where a man could step out of the line, set his pack down, and breathe. The stampeders called it the Golden Stairs. The line was so continuous and so tightly packed that stepping out of it was a genuine decision.
If you stepped off onto one of those shelves to rest, you lost your place, and getting back in could cost you a long wait, because the line did not open up for you. So men climbed without stopping, bent under the weight in a slow shuffling rhythm set by the man in front. A single trip up those stairs could take six hours. Six hours to climb a thousand feet with fifty pounds on your back.
Most men had one climb in them per day, and each climb moved fifty pounds of a two-thousand-pound obligation. You can see why it took three months. At the summit, the Mounties weighed you, and you crossed into Canada and came down a short way to a place with the perfect brutal name of the Scales. It sat at about three thousand feet, three-quarters of a mile below the very top, where your goods got reweighed and reckoned.
It was also where the mountain quietly decided who was actually going on. It became a vast open-air junkyard of broken ambition. People got to the Scales having hauled their outfit up in agonizing stages, looked at what was still ahead, and quit. They abandoned everything right there.
Photographs of the Scales show it heaped with discarded goods, sleds and stoves and sacks and tools, a whole graveyard of the ton that had beaten the people carrying it. Some men made it to the top of the hardest climb on the continent and simply sat down in the snow and were done. On the 3rd of April 1898, the mountain stopped being a hardship and became a killer. That winter had dumped enormous amounts of snow onto the high slopes above the trail through February and March.
Then at the start of April, the weather turned warm, and warm winds came up from the south. Warm wind on a deep, heavy, unstable snowpack on a steep slope is the exact recipe for catastrophe. The old hands on the trail knew it. There were warnings.
Some men refused to climb and turned back toward Sheep Camp to wait it out. On the morning of April 3rd, which was Palm Sunday, a mass of that snow let go on the slope between Sheep Camp and the Scales, right on the pack trail where the human chain moved. It came down on people strung out along the route, blinded by the storm, unable to see it coming. The exact number of dead has never been settled.
These were transient men from everywhere, many traveling alone, and there was no complete list of who was even on the mountain that day. Rescuers dug for hours. The victim lists that survive do not agree with one another. The National Park Service, which manages the trail today, puts it at more than sixty-five dead and calls it the single deadliest event in the history of the Chilkoot.
More than sixty people killed in about the time it takes to read this sentence, on a Sunday morning on their way to be weighed. The other way over the mountains started at Skagway and climbed the White Pass. On paper, it was the better route. It was lower, it topped out gentler, and crucially it was just wide enough in places to bring animals, which meant a man did not have to carry the whole ton on his own back.
He could load it onto horses. And that, as it turned out, is exactly why the White Pass became the site of one of the ugliest episodes of the whole rush. The men pouring into Skagway knew nothing about horses or did not care. They bought whatever animals they could find, worked them past exhaustion, loaded them with as much as four hundred pounds, and drove them up a narrow, muddy, rock-strewn trail that turned into a bog under thousands of hooves.
The horses died in their thousands. They starved. They broke their legs on the rocks. They slipped off narrow ledges.
When they could not go on, they were left where they fell. A young writer named Jack London was on that trail in 1897, a stampeder like the rest. He wrote that the horses died like mosquitoes in the first frost, and that from Skagway to the summit they rotted in heaps. He said men shot them or worked them to death or drove them over the cliffs, and that the men themselves grew cruel on that trail in a way that frightened him.
People started calling it the Dead Horse Trail, and the name stuck. More than three thousand animals are thought to have died on it. London got his material here. The Call of the Wild and White Fang come straight out of this frozen ground.
The gold barely touched him. The place made him a writer. Presiding over Skagway at the bottom of that trail was the human predator of the story. Jefferson Randolph Smith, known to everyone as Soapy Smith, was a con man who had worked the mining towns of the American West for years.
He came north and effectively took over Skagway. He ran a gang that historians put somewhere between two hundred and three hundred men, a complete machine for separating a stampeder from his money. There were rigged games, fake telegraph offices that took your fee to wire a message home down a line that connected to nothing, and men who would befriend you off the boat and steer you straight into being robbed. A stampeder could survive the sea voyage and still lose the outfit he had spent his savings on before he ever reached the trail.
Soapy Smith ran Skagway until July 8th, 1898, when the town finally turned on him and he died in a gunfight on a wharf, shot by a man who also died of his wounds. By several accounts, after the April avalanche, Smith had set himself up as the coroner of the disaster and used the position to go through the pockets and caches of the dead. Even the catastrophe got robbed. Then the machines came.
In the spring of 1898, engineers strung aerial tramways up the Chilkoot, buckets on cables that could haul goods to the summit for a fee. One of them, run by the Dyea-Klondike Transportation Company, opened in March of 1898 and was powered by electricity carried on a seven-mile line. It had the strange distinction of being, at that moment, the only tramway in the world run by electric power on a mountain at the edge of the subarctic, in a place with no roads. But look at the timing, because the timing is the whole tragedy.
Those trams came online in the spring of 1898, and by then the great human chain had already done the work. The men in the famous photographs had spent the entire dark winter carrying their tons up by hand, fifty pounds and six hours at a time, because while they were climbing, there was no machine. And even once the trams existed, a stampeder counting every dollar of his outfit could not afford the toll to send a ton up by cable. The technology that could have saved their backs arrived just as their backs were no longer needed.
Within about a year, the whole thing would be obsolete anyway, because a proper railway was punched through the White Pass. After that, nobody carried a ton over that mountain on foot ever again. Then the ice broke. All that winter at Lake Bennett and Lake Lindeman, where the trail ended, the men who had gotten their outfits over had been building boats, sawing green lumber into rough hulls by the thousand, waiting for spring.
When the ice on the lakes finally went out at the end of May 1898, more than seven thousand of those boats launched in a matter of days, a ragged navy of amateurs, and floated off down the Yukon toward Dawson and the gold. Seven thousand boats built by hand by people who had already walked twenty-five hundred miles to reach the water. Here is how it ended for most of them. They got there too late.
By the time the great wave of stampeders reached Dawson in the summer of 1898, having survived the ton and the stairs and the avalanche and the con men and the river, almost all of the good ground on the creeks had already been staked years before by the people who were there first. Of the roughly hundred thousand who set out, only around thirty to forty thousand even completed the journey. Of those, most never found meaningful gold at all. The majority turned around and went home or drifted on to the next thing, poorer than when they had started.
The rush was effectively over by 1899, three years after it began. It left behind a couple of ghost towns and a set of photographs. What those men did on the Chilkoot is one of the purest demonstrations of what an ordinary human body will do when a person decides something is worth it. They were not soldiers under orders, and they were not trained mountaineers.
They were clerks and farmers and shopkeepers, most of whom failed at the actual goal, who nonetheless carried a ton of goods over that summit by hand in the dead of a subarctic winter on nothing but the belief that a better life was waiting on the other side. For almost all of them, the gold never came. The climb, though, was completely real, and the record of it is that black line of dots on the white slope, tiny and bent and endless.
Every one of them a person who got up in the cold and did it one more time.