Klondike Mike: An Alaskan Odyssey

By Merrill Denison

Klondike Mike: An Alaskan Odyssey is Merrill Denison’s 1943 biography of Mike Ambrose Mahoney, a Canadian who travelled to the North in 1897 in search of gold and adventure. In Klondike Mike—a popular “Book of the Month Club” choice—Denison uses imagined omnipotent disclosures of his subject’s thoughts to enrich his writing with a sense of immediacy. In episodic scenes, readers accompany Mahoney through mishaps and adversity: Mahoney hauling a piano on his back up the Chilkoot Pass so that the Sunny Samson Sisters Sextette can get to Dawson to make their fortunes entertaining prospectors; or Mahoney setting a record with his team of dogs as they race across the frozen North from Dawson to Skagway in only fourteen days. The dramatic tension inherent in each of these adventures provides Klondike Mike with a surging narrative pulse and pace—a clever evocation of gold rush fever. In these ways, Klondike Mike demonstrates that Denison should be considered an early innovator of the genre now known as creative non-fiction.

Richly illustrated throughout.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Release date: Jan 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781789123036

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Text originally published in 1943 under the same title.

© Papamoa Press 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

KLONDIKE MIKE:

AN ALASKAN ODYSSEY

BY

MERRILL DENISON

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

MAP 4

DEDICATION 6

FOREWORD 6

ILLUSTRATIONS 9

PART ONE 10

PART TWO 66

PART THREE 154

PART FOUR 223

EPILOGUE 252

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 260

MAP

DEDICATION

To

May Lamberton Becker

FOREWORD

THIS is the story of a legendary figure seen from inside looking out...a narrative such as Paul Bunyan, John Henry or Joe Magarac might conceivably have inspired had anyone been on hand to record their living memories.

Ordinarily, the story of the folk hero must be confined to externals. Around the figure of Paul Bunyan, for example, a voluminous literature has grown up which is exclusively outward in effect. So far as we know, the great half-god of the pine woods left no personal record behind him, no single clue to show what he was like inside. Denied a knowledge of the inner man, folklore pictures him as somewhat of an extrovert, a latter-day Hercules who moved upon his objectives with simplicity and directness, a sort of uncomplicated Superman whose inner motivations seem to spring only from the desire to outdo his own prodigious deeds.

Such an interpretation of the Bunyan character seems plausible enough, but it is based on sheer conjecture. No one knows, nor is there any way of knowing, what prompted Paul to accomplish his fabulous feats, what he felt like in the process, or how he whiled his time away between heroic outbursts. That he was marvellously endowed physically, no one can deny, but what manner of man was he in other ways? Was his Gargantuan prowess matched by an equal breadth of spirit? Who were his friends, and how did they find him as a daily companion? Was he as forthright and uninhibited as folk mythology has made him appear, or did he have his moments of doubt and introspection? In his moments of relaxation, was he agreeable and kindly, tolerant and understanding, or was he inclined, perhaps, to be saturnine and egocentric? These are questions that can never be answered. However much we may know about Paul Bunyan, the folk hero, we can never learn more about him as a human being, although human in origin he surely must have been.

Herein lies the unique quality of the story of Klondike Mike Mahoney, strong man of the north. Quite apart from its interest as a document of human adventure, it is the record of a man whose feats of extraordinary strength and physical endurance have made him a legendary character during his own lifetime and won for him a permanent place in the mythology of the last frontier, the north of the Yukon and Alaska during the years of the gold rush that began in 1897. Where U.S. Army Engineers are now bulldozing the Alcan Highway across muskegs and over mountain passes, Klondike Mike mushed as a young man and established records for speed and endurance that stand to this day. In a world where brawn and muscle were no more noteworthy than trees in a forest, his deeds and prowess were known from Skagway to Cape Prince of Wales and served Jack London, Robert Service and Heaven alone knows how many other writers with much of the factual material upon which they based their heroic fictions of the north.

Today Klondike Mike is a retired businessman in his middle sixties living in Ottawa, Canada. It was in this latter-day guise of Michael Ambrose Mahoney, successful cartage agent and building supply contractor, that I first met him in the summer of 1930 when he visited my home at Bon Echo in the Ontario backwoods. I was engaged in writing a documentary motion picture for the Dominion government, and Klondike Mike had been invited by the technical crew from Ottawa to come along and watch the shooting. He was then in his middle fifties, a heroic figure of a man, well over six feet tall and as straight as a white pine. His Irish ancestry was written in the square, strong lines of his face and his large, leonine head was crowned with a mass of white hair still slightly tinged with red. He wore an ordinary business suit, but his big frame and hard-muscled body showed wherever cloth and wearer touched, and gave the impression that city clothes were for some reason out of character. He appeared to be a man accustomed to hard work in the out-of-doors but belying this assumption, his unusually large and beautifully modelled hands looked as if they had never known an hour’s manual labour. Otherwise he seemed to be as presented: a well-to-do businessman off on a weekend holiday, somewhat shy and reserved with strangers, but obviously friendly and companionable.

But soon incongruities appeared. In spite of his height and solid bulk, the stranger from Ottawa moved with the light-footedness of a trained boxer or a dancer, either of which avocations seemed improbable. A chance remark revealed that sometime in his past he had been a river driver and after some urging he gave a demonstration of log birling that was amazing. On location with the camera crew, he was discovered to have a profound knowledge of the backwoods and its ways. Before twenty-four hours had elapsed he had been drafted as the principal technical adviser for the picture, whose theme was conservation.

Gradually, the figure of M. A. Mahoney, Ottawa businessman, merged into the shadowy outlines of another: Klondike Mike, erstwhile Yukon sourdough, but it was not until his last night at Bon Echo that the Alaskan character emerged with clarity. Sitting on a terrace overlooking the still Laurentian Lake, Mike Mahoney told tales of the Yukon and Alaska, of the trails of ‘97 and ‘98, of Dawson, Nome and Fairbanks, of polar bears and drifting herds of caribou, of Soapy Smith and Dangerous Dan McGrew. In answer to a query about the fabled difficulties of the Chilkoot Pass, he answered, It depended on the man. I once toted a piano over it myself. He dismissed the equally notorious White Pass crossing as tough in spots but nothing to worry a man in good condition. He spoke of a winter spent alone with a husky for a cabin-mate and casually mentioned covering seventy-five to eighty miles by dogteam in a single day. He alluded briefly to a four-hundred-mile trek as guardian to a frozen corpse with spent dogs and a hungry wolf pack for companions.…

I was already familiar with the lore of the gold rush, but I was fascinated both by the tales told that night by Klondike Mike and by the way he told them. Three decades after the events such tales were already legion and time and the storytelling art had tended to mould them into the Homeric pattern of arranged mythology. In the Mahoney versions, one caught the authentic notes of observed experience, as one might have heard at Ithaca listening to Ulysses talk familiarly to his old companions.

Mike Mahoney left Bon Echo the next morning and our paths crossed infrequently during the next ten years. On each occasion I garnered more details of his story and each time became more convinced that he was, in fact, a living legend with a remarkably clear memory of the details of many of the incidents upon which his legendary fame was based. Finally, I induced him to let me record the story as he had told it to me, but through the ‘30s he was too absorbed in pursuing a second career, embarked on at the age of fifty-five, to take time out to submit to the necessary questioning. At last, however, the time came when it was possible for him to engage in the ordeal of recalling the salient features of adventures extending over a period of some thirty-five years.

Although the story is told in the third person, for many practical reasons, it belongs to Klondike Mike. It is a record of his own experiences as they appeared to him at the time. I have put down what he has told me, without taking liberties with the material, except where it seemed advisable to use fictional names for those of persons still living and who might be unnecessarily offended by Mike’s version of some joint adventure. No effort has been made to annotate the story for the reason that such treatment did not lend itself to his flowing narrative. Documentation, however, would have been entirely possible. My research uncovered many newspaper clippings, old receipts and memoranda, as well as the testimony of other sourdoughs who corroborated the salient details of his story.

If Klondike Mike’s deeds belong less in the realm of imaginative and extravagant fable than the mighty Bunyan’s, they were nevertheless so impressive to his contemporaries as to win him a place in American folklore. He was one of those whose exploits and manner of accomplishing them furnished the stuff out of which one of our imperishable folk heroes was created: the Strong, Silent Man of the Great Open Spaces. To be specific, you will find him in Burning Daylight and other of Jack London’s stories of the north. At least one of his adventures seems to have served as the inspiration for one of Robert Service’s best-known poems, The Cremation of Sam McGee, and all unconsciously he has provided a host of other writers with the basic elements of Alaskan characters. Viewed romantically and moulded into the conventions of a school of fiction of which he was one of the unwitting causes, Klondike Mike has made his appearance in stories, books and movies without number.

His own memories of his experiences, honestly recalled and categorically set forth, are at times in violent contrast and, at others, surprisingly in accord with the thousand and one romantic interpretations that have already found their way into print and celluloid.

MERRILL DENISON

New York

and Bon Echo

November, 1942

ILLUSTRATIONS

Skagway

Mahoney—Age Seventeen

Jr. Champion of the Northern Michigan Peninsula

Up the Chilkoot Pass

One Mile River

Map of the Klondike

White Horse Rapids

Dawson

Chilkoot Summit Was No Place for a Piano

Rock Creek

Dawson Wasn’t a Dull Town in 1898

Feeling Ran High

Mike Mahoney Begins to Think About Gold

Miners Rocking on Nome Beach

A Record Breaking Consignment of Gold

The Government Hired Him

A K.O. Turns Into an O.K.

Mahoney’s Social Life Begins

Bringing the Body of Judge Humes from Fairbanks to Valdez

And There Was Gold

Mahoney Sluicing Winter Dump on 16 Gold Stream

Mike Mahoney Today

PART ONE

WITH the first rattle of the anchor chain all hell and commotion broke out aboard.

A short time before, the rusty little tramp had seemed less a ship than a symbol of man’s gallantry and courage. Ploughing her way up the Alaskan fjord with sun behind her, she had appeared no more than a blur in the centre of a golden halo: a tiny argosy come to challenge the forbidding mysteries of the north. With her headway gone and her hook running free to grapple bottom off the gravel beach, she could be seen for what she was—a dingy old coast-wise collier, criminally overloaded. Built to carry coal and a working crew, she had on board six hundred or more stampeders with their gear bound for the new gold rush to the Klondike.

Below decks young Mike Mahoney heard the chain go and a sudden rush of feet above his head. Leaning out of an open side port when the list began he watched the water creeping up the scabby plates below him. The list grew and grew until, for an uneasy moment, it seemed as if the old overburdened steamer had grown tired at last and was debating whether to fight back to an even keel or roll without resisting beneath the surface of the gold-stained water.

Behind young Mahoney, forty frightened mustangs strained to keep a foothold on the sloping deck. Two slipped and went down screaming. A temporary stanchion sagged and splintered. Falling, it ripped out the flimsy partitions between two rows of stalls, and half the horses were down in a welter of heaving flanks and lashing hooves. Held by the list against the sloping side plates, the youth mumbled an unorthodox prayer and waited for the Willamette to make up her mind. Then came a great rush of feet on the deck above and slowly the dim, reeking hold resumed its accustomed relationship to the world outside. Mike waded in with all the confident strength of his twenty-one years and two-hundred-pound body to restore order and quiet to the horse deck.

He was six feet two, with an athlete’s build, and carried a luxurious mop of copper-red hair that in the sunset light seemed literally aflame. He had a big head and a wide, square-boned face tanned the colour of a ripe tangerine. A pair of alert blue eyes swept over the struggling, squealing horses as he jumped among them feeling no more concern than a kennel master imposing his authority on a pack of unruly hounds. Indifferent to the danger, the youthful giant wrenched and clouted the animals to their feet and brought back peace and tranquillity among them by the authority of his voice and mighty fists.

Gradually the squeals of panic died away. With the horses once more safely tethered, Mike Mahoney went out on deck to see what would be his next move in the strange adventure that found him, a raw shanty lad from the backwoods of Quebec, caught up in the stampede to some unknown place called the Yukon.

Like himself, most of the makeshift crew had signed on for their passage and it was dusk before they had the unloading gear assembled. All that night and through most of the next day the work of clearing the ship continued. The cargo had to be lightered a mile to shore and in the grimy light of the ship’s lanterns and the fitful glare of smoking torches, men worked with the unflagging industry of ants to move their goods to the gravel beach at Skagway. None laboured harder or to better effect than young Mahoney. For twenty-four hours he ferried freight and passengers across the mile of open water, lending a helping hand wherever it was needed; revelling in the strength that enabled him to perform more prodigiously than any one.

When the humans and their goods had been dumped in magnificent disorder on the beach, he returned to the ship to help unload the horses. The unbroken animals, fresh from some Montana range, were first slung up on deck and then bunched together by a rope run around their rumps. A few turns of the steam winch tightened the line and forced the bewildered creatures toward an opening in the ship’s rail. One by one they were thrust over the side and into the icy water. Already half frenzied by their experiences on the rough passage north, the mustangs plunged toward the shore. A few drowned from shock and exhaustion. Others were caught when they struggled up the beach. A few, with the courage born of fear and hatred of humankind, reached the safety of the dense spruce forest or dodged crazily along the beach, leaving in their wake a tangle of broken guy ropes, struck tents and cursing, fuming men.

Mike remained attached to the horse outfit for a couple of days, helping to build a corral and round up the runaways. The job paid him nothing, but he had the feeling that it would be wise to have a roosting spot somewhere in the crazy turmoil of the beach. In all his twenty-one years, he had never seen anything like it nor imagined that such wild confusion existed anywhere on earth.

Six weeks earlier, the remote northern beach at the mouth of the Skagway River had boasted no human habitation but a one-man trading post: an insignificant pin-prick of human enterprise on the little-known Alaskan coast. When Mike reached there early in September, 1897, a sprawling tent city had come into being and the gravel delta had a population of five thousand. From the moment he stepped ashore, the frenzied excitement of the sprawling camp seemed to lay a spell on him. So much so that he turned down a job at the corral although he had less than six dollars in his pocket and the clothes he wore: a suit of dungarees, footwear, shirt, underwear and socks.

For the moment these were all he needed. With an ingratiating grin and the strength of a young ox, he had only to offer to help some struggling newcomers to receive a meal or a place to hole in for the night, and before signing himself up for any definite job, he wanted to get his bearings.

For a week he roamed around, part tramp, part roustabout, and wholly a puzzled tyro. Before his eyes the camp expanded against the dark wall of the spruce. On three sides rose the high ridges of the coastal mountains; to the southwest stretched the Lynn Canal, leading to the Pacific. Up the canal, by day and night, boats kept arriving to add to the impatient horde upon the beach; then turned back south to seek new cargoes. One morning a wide slash in the spruce marked the beginning of the town site. Along it as if by magic appeared big walled tents to house saloons. A portable sawmill was assembled overnight. To the clang of axes and the crash of falling trees were added the drone of the power saw and the hoot of the steam whistle. At the tip of the long gravel spit washed down by mountain torrents, an old-timer named Captain Moore began to build a steamship dock.

Mike was everywhere, saw everything and listened to everyone. Wherever he circulated, talk was centred on two subjects: gold in the Klondike and the terrifying trail that led there.

Gold meant little to him, but he was fascinated by the stories of the trail. Life in the shanties had taken him into rough wilderness country, but nothing comparable to the tales of the tough going across White Pass to the headwaters of the Yukon River. This was the route over which stampeders had to pack their supplies before building boats to float six hundred miles down the great sub-Arctic river to the Klondike. Opened but a few weeks, the trail was already referred to as the Slough of Despond. Horses were pictured as dying by the score and virile men collapsing in their tracks. The path was said to be so narrow that but one line of pack animals could move along it; so rough that a mile an hour was considered a good speed. Mike heard men tell of sink holes deep enough to swallow horses; precipices so high that only eagles knew them, and gullies into which the sun’s rays never penetrated. And these were only hazards of the White Pass Trail itself; beyond it were rapids swifter than Niagara; vast, trackless forests and glacial cold that froze the marrow.

Columbus, embarking on an earlier quest for treasure, anticipated no worse dangers than the stampeders who landed at Skagway to brave the Trail of ‘97. In spite of the reputed difficulties, each day saw more men join the gold-hungry line that led out of camp and disappeared in the spruce swamp. Some had horses, some plodded away carrying heavy packs on their own backs, and as young Mike watched them, his curiosity and wonder grew. Before the week had passed, the trail became an obsession, and he knew he would have to have one look at it before he could settle down and pick up some of the easy money that flowed ‘round the camp like water. But how was he to manage it? His assets were a shipboard outfit and six dollars.

The problem was solved one evening when he brushed into a prospector in the Pack Train Saloon, one of the half dozen social centres of the camp. Mike saw the man sitting off in a corner by himself, a weather-beaten, wiry-sinewed old fellow who turned out to be not only a genuine prospector but an old-timer who actually had been in the interior and whose knowing eyes had seen the Klondike! Mike clung to his discovery like a burr.

While carpenters hammered around them, erecting a frame building outside the canvas walls, they sat and talked: the eager redheaded lad and the veteran who had passed two winters in the Yukon and who talked familiarly of such fabled places as Dawson, Forty Mile and Circle City. At first, the old sourdough told Mike yarns that differed little from all the other tales the lad had heard. The stories were, perhaps, taller and wilder, but they were studded with the same grim hardships, starvation and death on lonely trails. Later, when the saloon began to empty in the grey unconviviality of dawn, the old-timer leaned across the rough plank table and suddenly grew confidential.

Listen, son, he said, it ain’t the trail itself that means so much. It’s the feller who’s going to cross it. Now take White Pass; it’s as awkward a goddamn piece of walkin’ as you’re ever likely to come across. For them that’s never been off city pavements, chances are it’ll seem a killer. But for a man that knows the bush and is in A number 1 shape—why, hell, there ain’t one damn thing to be scared of.

If there was one thing Mike knew it was the bush, and he had always kept himself in A number 1 condition. At twenty-one he had yet to touch liquor or tobacco and could tote a hundred-and-fifty-pound pack as easily as most men carry fifty.

Before the morning was out Mike had taken a job with Captain Moore getting timbers for the new wharf. During the next five days, he swung an axe on the mountainside high above the camp and watched big sticks hurtle downwards to land with a mighty splash in the water, five hundred feet below him. The pay was fabulous: twelve dollars a day, and when he had sixty dollars coming, he stopped into Moore’s trading store and bought an outfit such as he would use for hunting in the Quebec bush: a mackinaw coat and trousers, a second suit of woollen underwear, three pairs of heavy, knee-length socks, a pair of native shoepacks, a good double blanket and a rubber ground sheet. For tools, he picked up a three-pound axe, stout clasp knife, tin pannikin, small skillet and a package of sulphur matches in a waterproof container; for food, a chunk of bacon, ten pounds of beans, some hard tack and a little tea and sugar. The whole outfit cost less than thirty dollars and weighed less than thirty pounds.

What’s goin’ on, Mahoney? asked Captain Moore when Mike’s purchases began to mount. Not thinking of quitting me, are you? Ain’t I been paying you enough?

Everything’s fine and dandy, answered Mike. I’ve just got a hankering to mosey up the White Pass Trail and take a look at it myself. I been hearing so much about it being a man-killer, it’s got me curiouser’n hell.

You’re not thinking of trying to push through to Bennett with this outfit? asked the trader.

Mike disclaimed any such intention. All I’ve got in my mind is to do a little exploring on my own, he said. I’ll be back in two days at the most.

A mile along the trail from the stampeders’ tent city was the corral to which Mike had delivered the horses he brought up from Seattle. He bunked there the night that he quit Moore. He was up and on the trail the next morning before the fog had lifted from the spruce. For two hours he picked his way through an unreal world, seeing no more than a few feet ahead, hearing nothing but the muffled sounds of the awakening bush. Halfway through the morning the white pall lifted and the trail came suddenly to life. Instead of a lone traveller in a lonely world, Mike found that he was one of an endless string of men and horses moving slowly along a worn and narrow path that wound with the river through the tangled evergreens.

Accommodating himself at times to the slow pace of a train ahead, pausing now and then to pass the time of day, circling around other outfits when the desire seized him, Mike pushed easily along all afternoon up the wild, rocky gulch of the Skagway River. That night he camped at a relay post where some packers told him that he was near the beginning of the steep climb to White Pass Summit. For supper he cooked an extra mess of beans so that he would not have to stop to fix lunch on the morrow. He slept that night rolled up in a fur coat he picked from a limb beside the trail and was on his way again before the sun was up. By mid-morning he had reached the summit of White Pass, a shallow barren trough set among desolate mountain peaks. Although it was only the beginning of September there was the promise of snow in the chill wind that blew from the waste of ridges to the north and east.

Mike halted to munch a handful or two of beans and decide whether to turn back or keep on a little farther. In the day and a half of walking he had encountered nothing that lived up to the fearsome reputation of the trail. There had been some awkward goddamn pieces of walking, just as the old sourdough had predicted. He had seen a few dead horses, festering beside the trail, and passed a number of abandoned outfits. Every hundred yards or so, there had been cast-off articles, such as the coat he had slept in the night before. With few exceptions, the men and animals he overtook impressed him as having no business on the trail, but not once had he seen anything to worry a man in good condition with a firsthand knowledge of the bush.

Perhaps if he went on a few miles farther he might come across the man-killing stretches he had heard so much about.

Picking up the stuff rolled in the rubber ground sheet, young Mike Mahoney stood thinking for a few moments and then turned his back on Skagway and walked off toward the north.

All that day he kept on walking...and the next day...and the next.

[2]

IN young Mike’s effortless crossing of White Pass and casual departure for the Klondike, six hundred miles away, there was an unmistakable flavour of Paul Bunyan. Contrasted with the recorded impressions of the Trail of ‘97, or with the Homeric legends built upon them, the exploit seems incredible.

Consider the circumstances: Gold was discovered in the Klondike in 1896, but the news did not reach the outside world until the following summer. On July 17, 1897, the first steamship down from St. Michael, at the mouth of the Yukon River, arrived off Portland. Boarding her as she came up Puget Sound, reporters met an assortment of bearded miners with quantities of virgin gold. No one knew the exact weight or value of that first shipment. No one seems to have made much effort to find out. There were sacks and boxes of it. That was enough. The stories flashed throughout America and across the seven seas screamed of tons of gold worth millions.

Virtually overnight, the stampede was under way. First from the western states and then from the wide-world over, a tide of eager, excited men set in toward ports on the Pacific coast: San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver. Along their waterfronts appeared the fit and the flabby, the horny-handed adventurer and the wild-eyed dreamer, the trader, gambler, parasite and crook, all heading for the rediscovered north.

Little was known about the location of the Klondike or the difficulties of getting there. Save for fishermen and north Pacific traders, Alaska itself remained largely a land unknown. Few people knew that the Klondike lay in the sketchily explored Northwest Territories of Canada. Reliable maps were non-existent, dependable information impossible to obtain. Only this was definitely known: gold had been found somewhere near the Arctic Circle, and there were two ways of reaching it: the long, expensive circuitous route by St. Michael and thence two thousand miles up the Yukon River—or the much shorter but less familiar route up the Inside Passage to the head of the Lynn Canal. The latter led to two small trading posts: Skagway and Dyea. From either, the navigable headwaters of the Yukon lay only forty miles away across the Coastal Range. Once on the Yukon, it was thought to be easy to float six hundred miles downstream to the Klondike.

Rallying to the greatest story in their generation, newspaper editors printed every obtainable morsel of fact, and embellished fact with fancy when fact wore thin.

On the factual side, warnings were printed of the grim, primeval character of the country. Every one contemplating the trip was told to take a full year’s supply of grub. On the romantic side, stories of Eldorado and Bonanza pictured those tiny creeks as knee-deep in gold and richer than the treasure of Montezuma. But it mattered little what was printed. Once the gold fever infected a man, he believed only what he wished to hear. So thousands embarked boldly on an adventure for which they were neither physically fitted nor properly equipped. Even on the most accurate maps, the short jump from the end of the Lynn Canal to the headwaters of the Yukon appeared to be such a simple undertaking!

The Klondike gold rush set in as a small trickle soon after mid-July, 1897. By early August it had become a steady stream and before the month was out, had assumed the proportions of a flood. There were no regular steamers sailing to lower Alaska and to handle the traffic, hulks along the Pacific coast were quickly pressed into service: tugs, river boats, side-wheelers, rusty tramps decaying on the mud flats of coastal harbours. Paying outrageous fares, stampeders crowded aboard them with their baggage to join the throngs moving up the Inside Passage to the hundred-mile fjord of the Lynn Canal.

Once landed on the beach at Skagway, the gold-seekers faced grim reality. They were but forty miles from the mighty Yukon, but the distance that had appeared so trivial on a map now threatened to prove interminable. Towering high above Skagway, the high ridges of the coastal mountains formed a barricade to the interior, crossed by two passes at three thousand feet: the Chilkoot and White Pass.

At the start of the rush, most of the traffic was drawn to White Pass, and over it was carried on the backs of men or animals every ounce of food and every pound of equipment needed in the gold fields. For those who could pay, Indians were willing to pack goods across at a dollar a pound, but the great majority of stampeders preferred to tote their own. This meant transporting over the divide a minimum of two thousand pounds of food and equipment for every single individual. Any attempt to reach the Klondike with a smaller outfit was considered suicidal.

According to contemporary reports, the narrow, winding track across White Pass was a horrible travesty on a road; a monstrous mockery of man’s pretensions as a builder; a hellish torment to any one not endowed with Herculean qualities. An Indian portage to begin with, it had served its purpose adequately until the feet of thousands of men and pack animals wore away the thin covering of soil and exposed the jagged, slippery, underlying rocks. Even then a small amount of co-operative effort would have kept the trail in passable condition, but each man who struggled over it was interested only in himself and how soon he could push on to the fabled riches of the Klondike.

From August, 1897, a line of weary men and suffering horses crept along the narrow route where the grave seemed more certain of attainment than the gold waiting at its end. The trail led over the delta, through swamps and bogs, up gulches and across the pass. Along it the stampeders edged forward step by step, each held to the pace of the slowest unit. Once beyond the summit, the plodding pack line went on at a snail’s pace over glacial moraines and the tailings of avalanches to Lake Bennett, where boats had to be built for the long trip down the Yukon.

Those who reached Skagway in the late summer of ‘97 were impatient to get through to Bennett before winter blocked further progress. Normal judgment vanished as men strove frantically for speed in a wilderness that defied them at every turn. So mental torment joined with physical torment and made the Klondike rush the frenzied, hysterical stampede which has been so often pictured. Supplies could be advanced only in stages of four to five miles a day, and one stage a day was the limit. This meant that an average outfit, with two thousand pounds of supplies, and consisting of a man and a single pack animal capable of carrying one hundred and fifty pounds, could progress only at the rate of five to six miles a week. If all went all, and the animal survived, the last of the supplies might reach Bennett after six weeks or two months of unremitting toil. The pack horse, having served its purpose, was sold, shot or turned out to starve, since hay beyond the passes cost almost as much as flour.

In October the rains came on the Pacific slopes and the overcrowded path became impassable for days. Over long stretches, the rain-soaked trail grew sodden, and in places no bottom could be found. Slipping into such bogs men and horses found themselves in viscous, semi-fluid muck in which they could not stand or swim or float. Average progress dropped to half a mile an hour and the trail was often blocked for hours while outfits struggled to rescue their foundered horses. Caught in a blockade at nightfall, there was no choice but to unpack and wait through the darkness, hoping to God that the exhausted pack animals would not roll down the mountainside. Within a few weeks the exposed bodies of dead horses lined the way, polluting the air with the stink of rotting flesh.

Yet most men struggled on. Determination as mad as it was stubborn was kept alive by the promise of the gold that waited beyond the pass and down the Yukon.

Some turned back, abandoning their outfits and their hopes. Many died of pneumonia, gasping their lives out under muddy blankets that could not keep them warm. Some were blinded by the blizzards that swept the upper levels and strayed from the trail, hopelessly lost, to find death in the oblivion of frozen sleep.

This was the trail that young Mike Mahoney put behind him in sixty unhurried hours.

Viewed in the light of contemporary experience, Mike’s casual conquest of the pass was a fabulous achievement; seen in the light of his own background, it was as inevitable as it was factual and understandable.

[3]

BEFORE young Mike Mahoney were his parents, Michael the elder and Bridget, born O’Callaghan, and before them uncounted generations of tall, rugged, big-boned Irish men and women, tracing back, perhaps, to the bands of roving Norsemen who settled in Ireland many centuries ago. Both were first-generation Canadians, born and raised within a few miles of the city of Ottawa, and on their wedding day in 1875 Michael stood five foot ten and a half inches in his stocking feet and weighed 195 pounds. His bride was even taller and some pounds heavier. In the parish, their marriage was looked on as a fine match, and each was considered lucky to have won the other.

Among the men, Michael was respected as a sober, honest, hard-working, God-fearing citizen who had never been known to lean on any man for anything. He was long-legged, with the shoulders of an ox, and was known throughout the district for his enormous strength. Once, when the grist mill broke down, he raised the cumbersome, heavy machinery on his back while he freed and replaced the king-bolt single-handed. In the shanties, it was not an uncommon thing for him to unload a four-hundred-pound barrel of salt pork unaided. Among the women, Bridget was envied for her handsome looks, liked for her cheery ways, and respected as an unusually capable young woman. She had gone to a convent school in Ottawa and could sew, cook and nurse much better than most.

Michael and Bridget Mahoney drove straight from their wedding to the farm given them by Michael’s father, and there settled to raise a family of ten children—evenly divided between boys and girls—of whom Michael Ambrose, or young Mike, was the eldest. The 135-acre plot of bush and pasture land was located on the northern fringe of an Irish farming settlement adjacent to Buckingham, Quebec, a busy sawmill town on the north side of the Ottawa River some twenty miles from Ottawa. Past the farm flowed the Lievre River, a husky, dark-brown stream that carried great drives of saw logs down from the Laurentians every summer. To the south a rocky wagon track wound four miles through the bush to Buckingham. To the north began the wilderness with little between the farm and the North Pole but a few scattered lumber camps.

Life on the farm was but one stage removed from pioneering, and required unending toil to provide food and clothes for the family that had to live off it. At dawn Michael senior would be either on the land or tending the stock, and long after