1897

 

Teddy Roosevelt writes, “A rich nation which is slothful, timid or unwieldy is an easy prey for any people which still retains those most valuable of all qualities, the soldierly virtues.”

 

At the time, hundreds of thousands of Cubans were dying under Spanish control. Richard Harding Davis, a correspondent who visited the island, came back convinced the U.S. had to stop the slaughter. 

Protests were not enough, he wrote. “Why should we not go a step farther and a step higher, and interfere in the name of humanity?”

 

Just a few short years before, at Wounded Knee, the U.S. had finally stopped killing Native Americans.

The role of wife and mother was the norm.

* 

July: A young man named Jack London has just quit his job in a laundry, when the steamship Portland docks in Seattle and the Excelsior in San Francisco. Miners from the Klondike are returning with three tons of gold from the Yukon. 

    London is soon infected with “Klondictis,” as gold fever was then called. He’s broke; but his 60-year-old brother-in-law, James “Cap” Shepard is also infected. Shepard mortgages his wife’s house to pay for a trip. During the late 90s, a hundred thousand prospectors attempted the journey north, across a harsh land. Only thirty thousand made it, with 65 dying in an avalanche one day, and typhoid striking many others down. Countless others gave up and turned around. 

    As for London, 

He grew up poor in a broken home, and at age 15, he joined a gang of prison-hardened oyster pirates who risked their lives in small boats at night, trying to outwit the armed guards who watched over the oyster beds in San Francisco Bay. Jack soon became an expert sailor, and an accomplished drinker and brawler in the waterfront saloons. At 17, he sailed across the Pacific and up to the Bering Sea on a seal-hunting ship. He also worked 16-hour days in a Dickensian canning factory in Oakland, hoboed from coast to coast on freight trains, learned to beg and steal, spent 30 days for vagrancy in a vicious New York jail, and became a confirmed socialist—all by the age of 19. 

 

    One of the first obstacles London and Shepard had to overcome was to climb up and over the Alaskan Coastal Mountains. Jack was a voracious reader, and packed books by Milton and Darwin. 

    They sailed away to Alaska on a ship packed with gold-seekers and partnered with three of them: “Big Jim” Goodman, an experienced miner and hunter; Ira Sloper, a gritty carpenter and adventurer who weighed barely 100 pounds; and a red-whiskered court reporter, Fred C. Thompson, who kept a terse, deadpan diary of the trip. Disembarking at Juneau, they hired Tlingit canoes and paddled up a 100-mile fjord to Dyea, where the infamous Chilkoot Trail began. 

    To reach the Klondike, they first needed to get themselves and all their supplies over the Alaskan coastal range, on a trail too steep for horses or pack mules. They sent 3,000 pounds of supplies to the summit with Tlingit packers, at 22 cents per pound, and carried the rest on their backs. Several sources state that Jack hauled about a ton, which was average. A strong man who could backpack 100 pounds had to make 20 round trips, walking a total of 40 miles, in order to move that burden one mile. 

      The going was rough and muddy, with patches of quagmire. They had to cross and recross a raging river on felled trees. “They are very hard to walk on, with water rushing underneath and one hundred pounds on your back,” Thompson noted in his diary. Men who fell were usually drowned by the weight of their packs; they were buried in shallow graves beside the trail. Nine miles out from Dyea, Cap Shepard was in so much pain from his rheumatism that he said goodbye to the other men and turned back down the trail.

The Chilkoot Trail.

* 

August 21: London and his comrades camp at the foot of the pass: 

The others pressed on through heavy rain and deepening mud. They picked up an elderly gold-seeker named Martin Tarwater, who offered to cook for them. … On August 21, with blistered feet and raw shoulders, they reached Sheep Camp, which Thompson described as “a very tough hole.” More than 1,000 stampeders crowded together in a muddy tent city. It was the last piece of level ground before the dreaded ascent to Chilkoot Pass.

 

    They would soon join others, crawling up and over the pass, as London later wrote, “like a column of ants.”     

    Some of the prospectors looked at the challenge ahead, dumped their supplies, and turned back in defeat. Others make the attempt, but strength and stamina fail and they must make it back to the States as best they can. London and his friends made it up and over but had to backpack their supplies 16 miles. At one point they had to build a boat, with masts and a sail, rigged by London. In brutal winds and blizzard conditions they saw two other craft capsize and drown everyone aboard.

 

    The days of decent weather were dwindling, and the travelers limited themselves to five hours of sleep per night.

 

* 

September 25: By this time, they had reached a tributary of the Yukon River and would have to “shoot the rapids” in Box Canyon to save time. Most prospectors refused to even attempt the passage, but a portage would take four days. London and his friends “voted to run the rapids.” 

    The 27-foot boat was heavily laden with supplies. There were hundreds of spectators on the canyon walls, predicting disaster. Jack steered with a sweep-oar as they careened through the white water, and the others paddled frantically to avoid getting dashed against the rocks. The current was so swift that they ran the mile-long canyon in two minutes, with no damage done except one snapped paddle.

 

* 

October 9: Still eight miles from Dawson City, London and his companions find several abandoned cabins and decide to settle down for the winter. 

Big Jim saw promising color in his gold pan. Jack staked out 500 feet on the left fork of Henderson Creek and boated downriver to file his mining claim in Dawson City.

 

    Founded the previous year, Dawson now had more than a dozen saloons with dance halls and gambling, a street of prostitutes called Paradise Alley and some 5,000 inhabitants living in cabins, tents and shanties. There was a food shortage, no sanitation, and the filthy streets were full of unemployed men and sled dogs. 

 

    London spent the next six weeks in town, all the while gathering material for the writing he planned to do. 

Partly to keep warm, he spent a lot of time in bars, and was often seen in conversation with the “sourdoughs,” or seasoned miners. These characters thought 40 below zero was good weather for hunting and dog-sledding, and they scorned the newcomers as cheechakos, or “tenderfeet,” who were liable to start whining after three days with no food. There was so much material for a budding novelist in those gaudy saloons, where men told tales of death outwitted and bonanza gold strikes, silk-clad women charged a dollar for a dance, $25,000 was sometimes wagered on a hand of poker, and everyone paid with gold dust or nuggets. 

 

    Jack also “befriended two brothers, Louis and Marshall Bond, who let him camp next to their cabin in Dawson.” He was especially impressed with their dog “a magnificent, 140-pound Saint Bernard-Scotch collie mix. The dog’s name was Jack, and he was the model for Buck, the canine hero of The Call of the Wild.” 

Marshall Bond was struck by Jack London’s unusual rapport with dogs. Rather than talk affectionately to them, and pet them, “He always spoke and acted toward the dog as if he recognized his noble qualities, but took them as a matter of course,” Bond wrote in his memoir. “He had an appreciative and instant eye for fine traits and honored them in a dog as he would in a man.”  

 

    Today, the saloon in the Dawson Hotel features a highly unusual cocktail, as Richard Grant writes: “The Sourtoe – a severed, mummified human toe dropped into the liquor of your choice. The legend is that the drink dates back to the 1920s, and originally involved an amputated frostbitten toe.” 

    The rules are no chewing or swallowing – as if! – and you were required to touch the toe with your tongue.

 

* 

December: 

at the coldest, darkest time of year, Jack left Dawson and snowshoed 80 miles up the frozen Yukon River, sleeping under blankets next to a fire. Weather records, and Jack’s recollections, indicate temperatures close to 70 below zero. Reaching the Stewart River, he joined his three partners in one of the log cabins they had found. It was 10 by 12, and even when the metal stove was red hot, meat would stay frozen on a shelf eight feet away. 

    They lived on sourdough bread, beans and bacon, supplemented by game meat, and they chopped water out of the river with an ax. Thawing the ground with fires, they dug for gold but found very little. They played a lot of cards, and visited back and forth with men in other cabins. Jack’s company was valued because he was an excellent conversationalist and storyteller, with a cheerful, generous personality. 

 

    Grant continues: 

    There’s no exaggerating how primitive the cabin is, or how cramped and smelly it must have been with four men living in it. They slept on spruce boughs and animal hides. The floor was ice and snow. When they ran out of candles, they burned bacon grease in a homemade lamp, and Jack smoked incessantly. They all got scurvy, or “Arctic leprosy,” from the lack of fresh vegetables and exercise. The disease killed many prospectors in the Klondike, and put an end to Jack’s brief career as a miner.