Brian Castner - Stampede: Gold Fever and Disaster in the Klondike

I am not fit to live among civilized men.

Robert Henderson

In those days the men who panned for gold in the streambeds of the Yukon valley would often work with a partner, to avert lonesomeness or starvation or worse, but Robert Henderson was his own man, never could find another who matched his endurance for misery, and so when he slipped while crossing an icy creek there was no one there to right him, and he fell, fell hard, and impaled himself upon the broken shards of a downed pine.

Henderson had been working his way across a tree trunk that he had dropped for a makeshift bridge, axe in his right hand, bracing himself against a limb with his left. Below, the stream rushed as a snowmelt cataract. He swung and chopped away the branches that barred his path but then the limb in his hand snapped and his feet came out from under him in a flash.

Henderson tumbled toward the torrent of water. Then sudden blinding pain as the jagged stump of a branch speared the flesh of his calf and wrenched him to a halt midair. There he hung on a hook, like an animal snared in a toothed foot-trap, dangling head-down over the flooded stream.

He was all alone. His axe was still in his hand.

With a lurch Henderson yanked himself up, the bloody stake straining against the tendons in his leg, and he swung hard with his axe. The blade bit and held and Henderson pulled and his chest met the trunk and he clutched it in a bear hug. His leg was somehow free but he dared not fall, and inch by inch he pulled himself to the bank.

Henderson sat in the muddy slush on the creek edge. A bad wound, he thought. He lowered his mangled leg into the ice-cold water and it numbed immediately. The creek went pink, then clear, and he pulled out the leg. He knew he could not walk. It was May, the days were long now, the sun warming, and yet snow still lay thick and the frozen Yukon River had not yet broken.

He was stranded, cut off, hungry, and lame. No one knew where he was, and even if they did, no one could reach him. Fifty hard miles to the nearest settlement, and the rapidly melting rivers were ready to rupture at any moment.

He set camp and prepared for a long wait. He carried very little. Flour, sugar, salt, a small bit of tea. Rifle, pistol, shovel, and pan. His clothes were rags, patches of wool and furs and buckskin, and his hobnailed boots were held together with burlap sacks. His last resupply at the trading post at Ogilvie, the last time he had seen another man, was the year before.

Henderson was blue-eyed, tanned, tall and lean like timber. He was nearly forty years old, no longer a young man, and his face was sunken, overcooked, all the fat drained off. He wore a long mustache that drooped at the corners of his mouth and occasionally got caught in his teeth. Old-timers called him a born prospector. He had the gold fever. He must, to spend the winter cutting trail from the Indian River all the way up Australia Creek, melting snow to wash gravel in the darkness. And for nothing but a few colors, a few specks of gold, two cents to the pan.