Pierre Berton - Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush, 1896-1899

Copyright 1972 by Pierre Berton Enterprises Ltd.
Anchor Canada paperback edition 2001

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

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National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Berton, Pierre, 1920
Klondike : the last great gold rush, 18961899

eISBN: 978-0-385-67364-8

I. Klondike River Valley (Yukon) Gold discoveries. I. Title.

FC4022.3.B468 2001 971.91 C2001-930604-0
F1095.K57 2001

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v3.1

All my life, he said, I have searched for the treasure. I have sought it in the high places, and in the narrow. I have sought it in deep jungles, and at the ends of rivers, and in dark caverns and yet have not found it.

Instead, at the end of every trail, I have found you awaiting me. And now you have become familiar to me, though I cannot say I know you well. Who are you?

And the stranger answered:

Thyself.

From an old tale

The Royal Family

The Mysterious North

Klondike

Just Add Water and Stir

Adventures of a Columnist

Fast Fast Fast Relief

The Big Sell

The Comfortable Pew

The Cool, Crazy, Committed World of the Sixties

The Smug Minority

The National Dream

The Last Spike

Drifting Home

Hollywoods Canada

My Country

The Dionne Years

The Wild Frontier

The Invasion of Canada

Flames Across the Border

Why We Act Like Canadians

The Promised Land

Vimy

Starting Out

The Arctic Grail

The Great Depression

Niagara: A History of the Falls

My Times: Living with History

1967, The Last Good Year

Picture Books

The New City (with Henri Rossier)

Remember Yesterday

The Great Railway

The Klondike Quest

Pierre Bertons Picture Book of Niagara Falls

Winter

The Great Lakes

Seacoasts

Pierre Bertons Canada

Anthologies

Great Canadians

Pierre and Janet Bertons Canadian Food Guide

Historic Headlines

Farewell to the Twentieth Century

Worth Repeating

Welcome to the Twenty-first Century

Fiction

Masquerade (pseudonym Lisa Kroniuk)

Books for Young Readers

The Golden Trail

The Secret World of Og

Adventures in Canadian History (22 volumes)

Drawn by Henry Mindak

To my father,
who crossed his Chilkoot in 1898,
and to my sons,
who have yet to cross theirs

When the first through passenger train of the Canadian Pacific Railway set off for the new terminus of Vancouver in June of 1886, Canada ceased to be merely a geographical expression. Bound together at last by John A. Macdonalds iron link, the country could expect the speedy fulfilment of his national dream the creation of a populous and prosperous North West from the empty prairie lands that had been given up a generation before by the Hudsons Bay Company.

But in the decade that followed, that vision was scarcely fulfilled. In the heady construction days of the early eighties, a western boom of unprecedented proportions seemed to be in the making; unhappily, over-optimism, wild speculation, drought, crop failure, and depression brought a swift decline in immigration figures. The bubble burst; and though the settlers continued to trickle in, the wave of newcomers that had been expected to follow the driving of the steel did not appear.

Suddenly, in 1897, the news from the Klondike burst upon the continent and everything was changed. The transition was instantaneous there is no other word for it. The CPR trains were jammed with passengers heading west to invade the North through Prince Albert, Edmonton, Ashcroft, or Vancouver. Within a year, the interior of British Columbia, the Peace River country, and the entire Mackenzie and Yukon watersheds were speckled with thousands of men and pack animals. For the first time, really, the Canadian north was seen to be something more than frozen wasteland: a chain of mineral discoveries, reaching into modern times, was touched off by the Klondike fever. Every western Canadian community from Winnipeg to Victoria was affected permanently by the boom. Vancouver doubled in size almost overnight; Edmontons population trebled. The depression, whose catalyst had been the silver panic of 1893, came to an end. It was replaced by an ebullient era of optimism and prosperity. New transcontinental railways were mooted and eventually constructed. A CPR contractors son, Clifford Sifton, who had just been named Minister of Immigration in the Laurier cabinet, launched his historic propaganda campaign to fill up the empty spaces on the plains. In the North West, a new boom was in the making.

The Klondike story, then, forms a gaudy interlude between the two epic tales of post-Confederation western development the building of the railway and the mass settlement of the plains. Since the author expects to tell the latter story in a subsequent volume, this expanded and revised edition of a fifteen-year-old work has been redesigned to conform to his two histories of the railway construction period, The National Dream and The Last Spike.

Because the stampede to the Klondike straddled the international border, it provides a unique opportunity to compare the mores and customs of two neighbouring nationalities. Here was the most concentrated mass movement of American citizens onto Canadian soil in all our history. In the space of fewer than eighteen months, some fifty thousand men and women brought up with the social, legal, and political traditions of the United States found themselves living temporarily under a foreign flag, obeying, however reluctantly, foreign regulations, and encountering a foreign bureaucracy and officialdom. In Dawson, and indeed almost everywhere save on the all-Canadian trails, the Americans outnumbered the Canadians by at least five to one.

It has often been said (usually by Americans) that there is no great difference between those who live south of the forty-ninth parallel and those of us who live on the Canadian side; but the Klondike experience supplies a good deal of evidence to support the theory that our history and our geography have helped to make us a distinct people not better and not worse but different in style, background, attitude, and temperament from our neighbours.

Our national character has not been tempered in the crucible of violence, and our attitudes during the stampede underline this historic truth. In all the Americas ours is the only country that did not separate violently from its European parents. We remained loyal and obedient, safe and relatively dispassionate, and we welcomed to our shores those other loyalists who opted for the status quo. If this lack of revolutionary passion has given us a reasonably tranquil history, it has also, no doubt, contributed to our well-known lack of daring. It is almost a Canadian axiom that we would rather be safe than sorry; alas, we are sometimes sorry that we are so safe.