David Meissner - Call of the Klondike: A True Gold Rush Adventure

I WANTED the gold, and I sought it;

I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.

Was it famine or scurvyI fought it;

I hurled my youth into a grave.

I wanted the gold, and I got it

Came out with a fortune last fall,

Yet somehow lifes not what I thought it,

And somehow the gold isnt all.

Robert Service, Klondike poet

18741958

Two True Adventurers

Stanley Pearce

Stanley Pearce and Marshall Bond were friends, business partners, and graduates of Yale University. Both had mining backgrounds and happened to be in the right place at the right time in the summer of 1897. They had been on a prospecting trip to Vancouver Island and returned to Seattle the night before the S.S. Portland docked. When they started their Klondike expedition, Pearce was twenty-six years old and Bond was twenty-nine.

When Stanley Pearce was two years old, his father, Richard Pearce, moved the family from England to Colorado to manage a mining operation. Richard Pearce was a talented metallurgist who constantly sought out new mining opportunities. Throughout their youth, Stanley and his three brothers traveled widely in Canada, the United States, and Latin America to look after their fathers mining interests. Even though Stanley spent much of his life in the U.S., he always identified with his British roots.

Marshall Bond

Marshall Bonds father was a prominent judge and a risk-taking businessman who moved his family often as he followed mining and business opportunities around the United States. As a result, Marshall grew up hunting, fishing, driving cattle, and exploring many parts of the western United States. After graduating from Yale in 1888, Marshall moved to Seattle, where he worked for his fathers mining company and started his own real estate business.

CALL OF THE KLONDIKE

GOLD FEVER STRIKES

Stores like Cooper & Levy sold tons of goods to eager stampeders.

W e caught the fever and decided to go. Everybody seemed to be catching it.

MARSHALL BOND

S tanley Pearce and Marshall Bond were in Seattle, Washington, when it happened. On July 17, 1897, sixty-eight rugged miners stepped off the S.S. Portland steamship and made their way through the excited crowd. They were carrying large sacks filled with the most precious metal in the worldgold.

Stanley Pearce described the scene this way: Thousands of people in the public square watched the weather-beaten and hardy adventurers stagger into the express office with sacks of gold, gold in blankets, in oil cans, and even in moccasins.

Together, these miners brought back an astounding four thousand pounds of gold. It was worth nearly one million dollars, which, by todays standards, would be many times that amount. Three days earlier, miners on another ship, the S.S. Excelsior, had arrived in San Francisco with large quantities of gold as well. Both groups of miners had found their gold in the same place: the Klondike region of northern Canada. Soon these discoveries would make headlines around the world.

In a matter of hours, many Seattle residents began planning their own trips to the goldfields. At a time when many Americans were either out of work or earning low wages, the prospect of striking it rich proved irresistible. Firemen, doctors, lawyers, ministersand even the mayor of Seattlequit their jobs and joined the rush.

By the afternoon, Pearce wrote, every man who could raise the necessary funds for a years grub stake was rushing to the grocers, hardware merchants and clothiers to get together the necessary outfit to start by the next boat for the promised land, where the dreams of all should be realized.

In all of their excitement, eager prospectors underestimated the fact that the new goldfields were located more than 1,500 miles north of Seattle, not far from the Arctic Circle. Dawson City, in Canada, the boomtown at the center of the gold rush, was so far north that on winter days the sun barely rose and temperatures could dip well below -60F.

Unsure of what they might be able to purchase up in Alaska and Canada, many stampeders brought more than a years worth of supplies, similar to the list above.

The journey there would be long and arduous, as gold seekers would soon find out. To reach Dawson City, most stampeders would travel by steamship to Alaska, haul gear over steep mountain passes into Canada, and then travel more than five hundred miles by boat down a series of lakes and rivers.

Most stampeders left for the Klondike from Seattle, which quickly transformed from an economically depressed city into a bustling port. Prospectors swooped into stores and bought thousands of dollars worth of goods. Every store seemed to advertise Klondike gold rush supplies, whether it was boots, guns, sleds, beans, or special Klondike underwear. Some Seattle entrepreneurs even advertised regular dogs as sled dogs that could pull heavy loads across snowfields and up frozen rivers.

Within hours of seeing the gold, Stanley Pearce and Marshall Bond decided to mount their own Klondike expedition. Bonds father, who happened to be in Seattle at the time, agreed to fund part of it. Now all they needed was for Pearces father to do the same. That morning, Pearce sent the following telegram to his father in Denver:

WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM

July 17, 1897, 9:15 a.m.

Seattle, Washington

To Richard Pearce:

News of wonderful richness of Klondyke northwest territory gold fields. Million dollars brought in last steamer. Excitement here similar California forty nine. Believe it chances for me thirty days trip from here. Last steamer Tuesday. Two thousand capital needed. Gone one year. Answer at once if you favor or not.