Brotherhood of the Klondike

By Jim Elik

Three young brothers discover the lost journal of their great-great grandfather. In it they learn of his adventures in the Klondike during the gold rush of 1898, when he was only seventeen years old. Through twists and turns, all of the characters get caught up in mysterious and intriguing circumstances.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 31, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257309092

Book preview

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Chapter One

The Discovery

I never knew my great-great grandfather. He died long before I or my two brothers, John T and Daniel, were born. As kids we heard stories about him from the adult members of our family during family reunions and get-togethers on the holidays. The tales that were told about him intrigued and mystified us. We learned that he had gone off to Canada or Alaska during the gold rush of 1898 and had spent many years there mining gold. No one in the family could recall if he ever struck it rich, but when he returned to southern Illinois in 1935 he bought fifty acres of ground and built a house and a huge timber frame barn and started a family. The homestead has remained in the family ever since that time and it is the house that I grew up in and that my parents still live in to this day. My brothers and I also learned that he died in 1939 from a brain tumor at the age of fifty eight.

The grown ups in our family always said that from what they were told, he was a little off his rocker towards the end of his life and he would tell wild exaggerated stories about his time in the North Country. Everyone attributed his ramblings to the brain tumor and dismissed his stories as just being tall tales.

The barn had fallen into decay and after dad built a new metal outbuilding to house the tractors, the old barn was declared unsafe and off limits to us boys. Of course, boys being boys, that just made it all the more desirable.

In the summer when school was out, we would get up early to do our chores, then sneak off to the old barn and climb the rickety ladder to the loft where we had established our secret clubhouse.

We sat up there for hours and talked about different things, but mostly we talked about our great-great grandfather and how neat it must have been to dig for gold and how we were sorry that we never got to know him. That was all about to change one sunny summer day in 1980 as we climbed up into the loft. On this day, we would come to know our great-great grandfather, Austin Jacob Meyerstone, like no one in our family ever had before. This was the day that changed our lives forever.

Hey Henry, you sit over there today, John T said as we all prepared to sit down in the loft.

Alright, but I have to brush the cobwebs off of the wall before I lean up against it, I told him.

As I was clearing the wall of dirt and spider webs I began to uncover letters which then became words as I scrubbed harder. The letters had been carved into the wall with a knife or similar object.

Hey, come look at this guys, I said to the others.

My brothers came over and together the three of us began to decipher the words on the wall. The heavy grain of the wood made it hard to tell what all of the letters were at first, but after looking at them from several different angles we all agreed as to what it said.

Wow! John T exclaimed, it says ten paces W from the SW corner - down 3 - AJM.

I know what that means, Daniel chimed in, I’ve read books on pirates and their buried treasure. It’s directions to something.

Yeah, I think the W stands for west and the SW stands for southwest, but what does down 3 mean? asked John T.

Well let’s take this one step at a time, I told them.

We have to take ten paces or steps in a westerly direction from the southwest corner of something, probably the barn we’re in. Now suppose we do just that. That leaves us standing in the middle of the pasture and then it says to go down 3. Do we go down another three steps, or could that mean we dig down three feet? I asked.

I’m not sure, Daniel answered, but I do know that the AJM has to stand for Austin Jacob Meyerstone, our great-great grandfather.

Duh, that’s pretty obvious," John T fired back.

Alright you guys, knock it off, I said. Let’s go back to the house and get a shovel and try to see if we can find anything.

With that the three of us climbed back down out of the loft and started running back to the house. We were almost there when suddenly, John T stopped dead in his tracks causing Daniel and me to plow into the back of him, knocking all of us to the ground.

I just thought of something, John said as he lay there next to us panting, we have to keep this quiet. We have to sneak the shovel out of the garage. Remember, we’re not even supposed to be in that old barn, much less be looking for pirate treasure near it.

He was right. In our excitement we had completely forgotten about the rules our Dad had established about not playing in the barn.

Well, technically we’re not going to be in the barn; we’re going to be outside of it, Dan surmised.

You’ll make a great lawyer some day, I told him, but for now, I think it’s best that we do this without anyone else knowing about it.

With the legal issue being satisfied we quietly went into the garage and grabbed the first shovel we could find and then ran like the wind out across the back yard and down to the barn once again.

After regaining our composure and catching our breaths, we walked over to the southwest corner of the barn and then all stood facing the west. Since I was the oldest, I was elected to be the official pacer.

O.K. here we go, I said as I carefully stretched my stride out to its limits.

I counted off ten steps and then stopped.

This is the spot to dig, I said proudly.

Dan and John T fought momentarily over the shovel and then after John exerted his extra 4 inches of height and his additional five pounds of weight, won the battle and became the shovel master.

Dig faster! Daniel prompted.

Leave me alone, I’m going as fast as I can, John T fired back.

I sat down on the grass and watched the digging of the treasure unfold in front of me. After what seemed like an hour, John was exhausted and asked for a volunteer to take over the shoveling duties.

I think I’m down at least 3 feet already, John said as he climbed up out of the hole he had dug.

Indeed, we were down over three feet and we had found nothing. We all sat and stared at the worthless hole in the pasture and wondered if ‘ol Austin Jacob Meyerstone was pulling a fast one on us.

Maybe the old coot was crazy, Daniel said as we sat there.

Hey, don’t talk that way about our ancestor, I shot back at him, but secretly I was having the same thought. Maybe we did something wrong.

We went back over everything we had done and it didn’t appear as if we had missed anything. Then I had a thought.

It says ten paces, but maybe Grampa’s paces were longer than ours, I said. Lets add an extra two paces to make up for our shorter legs and dig down three feet again.

You can dig this time, John said as he lay there in the grass, I’m pooped.

I grabbed the shovel and stepped off the extra two paces and started digging down again. One foot, then two and then finally the third foot and still nothing.

This is a wild goose chase. The old guy was nuts! Dan said in disgust.

I planted the shovel one last time into the bottom of the hole and it resonated with a distinctively hollow sound. It was the kind of sound that a watermelon makes when you give it a good thump with your fingers.

Whoa, did you hear that? I asked.

My brothers had heard it alright and they were both lying on their stomachs looking down into the hole as I carefully started to scrape away the dirt from the object that the shovel had just discovered. With each stroke of my hand a little more of the object was revealed. It was a wooden box of some kind and I quickly dug around its perimeter and wiggled it free from the dirt that encased it. Then in one motion I grabbed and lifted it up out of the hole and heaved it out onto the ground next to my brothers.

The box was nailed shut so we carried it back into the barn and then decided to get a rope and hoist it up into the loft before we attempted to open it, just in case someone came looking for us. This was our treasure, after all and we didn’t want to share it with just anyone!

It was at about this time that we heard our mom holler for us to come to the house for supper.

The treasure will have to wait until after we eat, I said, we don’t want to let our secret get spoiled now!

With that we all ran back to the house and got cleaned up for the evening meal. I must say that it was the longest meal in the history of eating. Every bite seemed to take forever to get down and in the meantime, Dad and Mom kept talking to us about this and that. It was all trivial to us as we sat there. If they only knew that we had a king’s ransom waiting for us in the barn they would quit talking so much and let us finish our meal and go about our business. We learned that evening that even the world’s best treasure hunters are often sidelined by the most mundane occurrences.

After what seemed like an eternity, the meal was finished and Mom told us boys to get lost for awhile before it got dark.

We all got up and casually walked to the back door and went out. As soon as the door slammed shut we took off like three miniature tornados and made our way back into the loft to open up the treasure chest.

John had paused briefly on the way out of the house to grab a hammer and we went to work carefully prying the lid of the dusty wooden box open. The nails made an awful sound as they were torn from their secure resting place inside the wood. We wondered if anyone would hear us as, one by one, we removed all of the nails and got ready to feast our eyes upon a box full of gold nuggets. We had our faces just inches away from the box as John lifted the lid. To our surprise and I must say, disappointment, no polished gold nuggets greeted our anticipation. Instead we found an old leather bound scrapbook or journal and three broken pieces of stone.

That’s it? Daniel asked, That’s the treasure?

I must admit, it didn’t look like much as we sat there staring into the box.

Well let’s see what this book is before we get too angry, I said to them.

I opened the journal and thumbed through the pages. It was a journal that had been hand written by our great-great grandfather before he passed away. In it was a written account of his journey and his days spent in the goldfields of Alaska and the Yukon Territory of Canada. We weren’t sure what the broken stone tablet was but after a careful examination we saw that it too had letters etched into it. We couldn’t tell what they said though and it looked as if they were in a foreign language to us. The mystery of the stone tablet would have to wait for now. We wanted to read the journal and find out more about this mysterious ancestor of ours and what he had done during the gold rush. Perhaps by reading the journal we would find out more about the broken stone and more about how our ancestor lived during the gold rush. The excitement was building but the daylight was dimming and we soon realized that it was getting too dark to read much of anything. We made the decision to wait until the next day before we started in on the journal. I carefully set the book back into the dusty box along with the pieces of stone and laid the lid back on top.

That night as we lay in our beds, the excitement of the upcoming day made it hard to fall asleep.

Man I’m not going to sleep a wink tonight, Dan said.

Me either, John chimed in.

Minutes later we all dozed off into a sound sleep. The digging and refilling of the two holes in the pasture had taken its toll on the three of us.

The crowing of the rooster startled us and it seemed like the night had only lasted an hour or so, instead of the eight that it had actually been. We got up and got dressed and did our chores in record time. Mom was very impressed with us and right after our work was finished she told us to get lost again for the day. That was all we needed to hear and the words were still ringing in our ears as we stormed out of the back door and headed off towards the barn.

Once inside and up the ladder to the privacy of our clubhouse loft, we lit candles and removed the lid of the dusty old box. The candles gave off an eerie glow which produced strange shadows all across the barn. I grabbed the journal and leaned back against the newly cleaned off wall and opened the book up to the first hand written page. Forty one years of sitting in the box underground had turned the pages a dull yellow, but all eyes were upon me as I began to read.

Chapter Two

The Journal

Today, at the age of fifty eight, I have been legally declared not to be of sound mind anymore. The doctors have said that the tumor in my head has done enough damage to my brain as to make anything I say not to be believed. However, I have a story to share with future members of my family; those individuals who will take me at my word even though they will never know me. I trust that fate will put this journal into their deserving hands.

Because I have been declared insane by today’s standards, I swear under the oath of the Brotherhood of the Klondike that at least part of what follows is true. I likewise swear that the rest of it isn’t.

I was born in the year 1881 and was the oldest of four children. When I was twelve years old the country fell into what they called a recession and a lot of folks lost their jobs as well as their savings. After two years of hard times, my Dad got me a job at the mine working alongside him. Coal mining in those days was tough work, especially for a fourteen year old boy, but I did the job almost as well as the older guys and I earned their respect.

I had been working the mine for three years when one day a section of roof gave way and landed so close to me that it knocked me off my feet. After the dust had cleared and the other men had gotten me out of the mine, my Dad said that coal mining was too dangerous for a young boy and made me quit that very day.

So, at the age of seventeen I found myself unemployed and growing more restless with each passing day. The thought of spending the next few years sitting around this dusty, boring town was more than I could take and one evening I announced to my parents and my brother and sisters that I was leaving. I had read newspaper stories telling about a fellow in the Klondike who had found gold. The articles had said that gold was trickling down nearly every stream up there and that a gold rush, or stampede, was underway. That sounded like the excitement I was looking for, so I packed a few items into a knapsack and stuffed my pockets with bread and cookies and headed out into the great unknown. Everyone in my family thought I was crazy back then, but with the times being so hard, my Dad was having trouble putting enough food on the table for everyone and with one less mouth to feed it would make things a little easier for him. He wished me good luck and walked me to the end of our long rock driveway.

I wish you weren’t going son, he said, but I understand why you have to leave. If your dream doesn’t pan out, you are always welcome back here.

With that being said, I started walking towards the one and only road out of town. I didn’t look back, as I knew it would be too painful; instead I told myself that I was only going to look ahead from now on. I was going to deal with the future and not the past. I wasn’t sure how I would manage to