The Land of the Midnight Sun (pre-1896)

The wind came down the Yukon River from the north, steady and dry, pressing the smoke from the cabin chimneys at Fortymile flat against the rooflines. At the confluence where the Fortymile River met the greater current, a cluster of log buildings stood on a terrace of frozen gravel: a trading post and a North-West Mounted Police detachment housed in a structure that served as post, jail, and customs office combined. The date was January 1896.

Inside the police office, a constable recorded the temperature from a spirit thermometer hung outside the window: forty-two below zero, Fahrenheit. The ink had to be warmed before it would flow.

A sourdough miner sitting across the desk claimed that a Tagish trader had sold him short on a hundred pounds of flour, and the trader, who had traveled down from the upper river with a dog team, sat on a bench with his hands folded and said nothing. The constable wrote the complaint in the occurrence book. He wrote the trader’s name. He noted the quantity of flour and the price charged. Then he asked the miner whether he had a written bill of sale. The miner did not.

A single man with a pen, a register, and a thermometer: that was the visible edge of Canadian sovereignty in the winter of 1895-96, recording disputes in a settlement reachable only by river or by foot over passes that closed in October and did not open again until May.

The authority he represented had arrived only the year before, when Inspector Charles Constantine established the first Mounted Police post in the Yukon district at Fortymile, on the Canadian side of the boundary, specifically to assert jurisdiction over a mining population that had been operating under its own rough code for nearly a decade. The police were not welcomed. They were tolerated, because they brought a post office and a mail route, and because their claim-recording system gave miners something they could not otherwise obtain: a document that proved ownership of a strip of creek bed in a country where the only other proof was a man’s word and his willingness to defend it with a rifle.

Fortymile sat in a landscape that no amount of institutional language could make gentle. The Coast Mountains formed a wall of granite and ice between the interior and the Pacific coast, running in a chain of peaks and glaciers that stretched from the latitudes of southern Alaska northward into the Saint Elias range.

No road crossed them. No wagon could climb them. The only routes through were the Chilkoot and White passes, both of which had been used for centuries by the Tlingit people of the coastal villages near what would become Skagway and Dyea, who held them as trade corridors and guarded them against outsiders.

Beyond the mountains, the interior opened into a vast watershed drained by the Yukon River and its tributaries, a river system that ran nearly two thousand miles from its headwaters in the lakes of the southern Yukon to its delta on the Bering Sea. The Klondike River entered the Yukon near the middle of this system, a modest tributary that wound through a valley of moss and spruce and muskeg, unremarkable among dozens of similar streams.

The entire region lay above the sixtieth parallel, and the subarctic climate imposed its own governance: winters of eight months, temperatures that reached sixty below, rivers frozen solid from October to May, and a brief summer in which the permafrost melted just deep enough to expose the gravel that lay beneath the organic mat of the valley floors. Every human movement in this country was dictated by these conditions. Travel was by river in summer, by dog team or snowshoe in winter, and by neither in the weeks of breakup and freeze-up when the ice was neither solid nor water. The land permitted no improvisation. Those who survived it did so by learning its calendar and obeying it.

The land was not empty. It had not been empty for thousands of years. The indigenous peoples of the north-west American interior had traded in copper nuggets long before any European expansion into the region, hammering the native metal into ornaments and tools that passed from hand to hand along networks that connected the coast to the interior plateau. Most of the tribes were aware that gold existed in the region. The metal was not valued by them. It was too soft for tools, too bright for practical use, and it carried no spiritual or ceremonial weight. The yellow metal in the creek beds was a curiosity, not a commodity.

The Tagish people of the southern Yukon interior occupied the lake country around what would later be known as Marsh Lake and Tagish Lake, at the headwaters of the Yukon River system. They were a small nation, closely connected by marriage and trade to the Tlingit of the coast, and their seasonal rounds followed the migrations of fish and game: salmon in the rivers in late summer, moose and caribou in the interior valleys in autumn, gatherings at the lake crossings in winter for trade and social ceremony.

The Tlingit, who held the coastal villages at the head of Lynn Canal, controlled access to the passes and had done so for generations. They were traders by tradition and by economic position, middlemen between the Russian and later American coastal trade and the interior nations. Their wealth was measured in blankets, dentalium shells, and dried fish, and their authority over the mountain corridors was both economic and political. No outsider crossed the passes without their permission, and that permission was granted in exchange for goods, for alliance, or for a share of whatever the traveler carried.

The Hudson’s Bay Company had pushed into the Yukon basin from the east, following the fur trade along the Mackenzie River drainage and across the divide into the Yukon headwaters. The Company established trading posts at several points along the upper river in the 1840s, exchanging manufactured goods for furs and gradually drawing the interior nations into a commercial relationship that displaced but did not erase the older trade networks.

The Russians, operating from their coastal holdings in what was then Russian America, had explored the lower Yukon from the coast, and their activities had brought the first sustained European presence into the region. Neither the Company nor the Russians came for gold. They came for fur, for fish, for the trade that could be conducted with peoples who already occupied the land and who already had an economy.

The HBC’s presence was thin, seasonal, and dependent on the cooperation of the indigenous communities whose trade routes it used. A post might consist of two or three men in a log building, receiving furs in the fall and spring, issuing goods on credit, and sending its returns out by canoe or dog team to the distant depots at Fort Simpson or on the coast.

The North-West Mounted Police first came to the Yukon in 1894, when Inspector Charles Constantine and Staff Sergeant Charles Brown traveled down the river from the Chilkoot Pass to assess the situation in the mining camps. He found a population of perhaps two hundred white men scattered along the creeks and rivers, working placer gold deposits in a manner that was small-scale, seasonal, and largely self-regulating. These were the sourdoughs, men who had come north in the trickle of prospectors that followed the early gold discoveries on the tributaries of the upper Yukon.

As early as 1883, Ed Schieffelin had identified gold deposits along the Yukon River, and by 1885 there was a considerable mining excitement due to these discoveries. A greater one followed in 1887, after the discovery of coarse gold on Forty Mile Creek, in American territory just across the boundary from the Canadian settlement that bore the same name. These earlier rushes were modest by any standard. They drew a few hundred men, not tens of thousands, and they produced a steady but not spectacular yield of gold dust and nuggets, shipped out by river steamer at the end of each season in coffee cans and buckskin pouches.

The men who worked these creeks operated under a miner’s code that had developed in the California gold fields and migrated north: a claim was a strip of ground measured by pace and marked by posts, recorded in a book kept by whoever volunteered or was elected to keep it, and respected so long as the claimholder worked the ground each season. The code was rough. It was also functional. It had to be, because there was no court within a thousand miles to enforce anything else.

Constantine’s report to his superiors recommended the establishment of a permanent police presence, and in the summer of 1895 he returned with a detachment of twenty men and built Fort Constantine across the river from Fortymile.

The police brought with them a set of assumptions about governance that were foreign to the mining camps: that authority flowed from a distant crown, that disputes should be adjudicated by an officer with a commission, that trade should be subject to customs duties and commercial regulation, and that the recording of claims was a function of the state rather than a community practice. The miners resisted what they could and accommodated what they could not.

They accepted the claim-recording system because it gave them a document. They accepted the post office because it gave them mail. They resisted customs duties because they had been bringing supplies up from Juneau and Sitka without paying anyone anything, and they saw no reason why a government that had never been present should now take a share of what they carried.

The tension between these systems was not dramatic. It was slow, bureaucratic, and conducted in the register of forms and occurrence books. A constable noted a dispute. An inspector wrote a report. A trader paid a duty or did not. The mining population was too small and too dispersed for open conflict, and the police presence was too thin to impose anything by force. What Constantine and his successors established was not dominion but a thread of authority, maintained by the physical presence of a few men in red serge who traveled the river between posts in winter by dog team and in summer by scow, checking the camps, recording the claims, and writing it all down.

The country through which they traveled was enormous and indifferent. From Fortymile, the Yukon River ran westward into Alaska for several hundred miles before bending north toward the delta, and eastward into the Canadian interior through a landscape of low hills, lakes, and muskeg that stretched to the Mackenzie divide. The tributaries that fed the river—the Stewart, the White, the Sixtymile, the Klondike—entered from the north and south in valleys that were narrow, timbered, and frozen solid for half the year. The placer gold that drew men to this country lay in the gravel beds of these streams, deposited by geological processes that had worked over millions of years, ground out of quartz veins in the surrounding mountains by water and ice and concentrated in the streambeds where the current slowed.

The miners who worked these deposits used the simplest of tools: pans, rockers, and sluice boxes built from rough lumber, fed by water diverted from the creek through hand-dug ditches. A man could work a claim alone or with a partner, and many did, living in cabins of spruce logs on the creek bank, eating beans and bacon and moose meat, and washing enough gold from the gravel to buy supplies for the next season.

The work was brutal and the rewards were modest. A good creek might yield five or ten dollars a day to a man working hard in the short summer season. A very good creek might yield twenty. None of them yielded what was coming.

The absence of the systems that would later define the rush was total. There was no infrastructure for mass movement. No warehouses stocked with tons of goods. No fleet of steamers running the river. No trail maintenance on the passes. No customs stations at the summit.

The trade that sustained the country was personal and small-scale: a trader at Fortymile or Circle City ordered supplies from Juneau or San Francisco, shipped them north by steamer in the summer, and sold them across a counter for gold dust at a rate he set himself. The indigenous communities continued their seasonal rounds, hunting and fishing and trading as they had for generations, intersecting with the mining economy at its edges, selling meat and furs and labor to the white men who needed them, and otherwise remaining outside a world that had not yet found a reason to engulf them.

The Tlingit and the Koyukon would prosper in the short term from the stampede that was coming, working as guides, packers, and suppliers of food. The Hän people, who lived along the Yukon and Klondike rivers near the mouth of the Klondike, would not. They were semi-nomadic hunters and fishermen, and they did not appear to know about the extent of the gold deposits in the region. When the stampede came, they would lose their fishing camps, their hunting grounds, and their position in a country that had been theirs.

What existed in the winter of 1895-96 was a country with a few hundred miners, a few police officers, a few traders, and a few indigenous nations, all living within the constraints of a geography and climate that none of them could alter. The Mounted Police kept their post at Fort Constantine, where the recorder entered the few claims that came in from the surrounding creeks; there was as yet no post, and no town, at the mouth of the Klondike River. The miners worked their ground. The traders sold their goods. The Tagish and Tlingit traveled their routes. The Hän fished the river. The winter settled over everything, and the cold held the country in a stillness that would have seemed permanent to anyone standing in it.

The mining code that operated in the camps before the police arrival was not lawless.

It was a system of claimed ground, in which a man who marked and worked a strip of creek bed had a right to it that was recognized by the community of other miners, and in which disputes were settled by miners’ meetings that could be convened on the creek bank with a day’s notice. The code gave a man a fixed place in the order of the camp, a reason to stay through the winter, and an identity tied to a specific piece of ground rather than to the shifting, unclaimed territory of the trails and the river.

The police claim-recording system formalized this code. A man who recorded his claim at the police post received a document that confirmed what the miners’ meeting had already granted. The document did not create the right. It recorded it. But the act of recording transformed the nature of the right, because the record existed in a book that would be taken downstream and eventually deposited in an office in Ottawa, where it would become a piece of a system that the miners could not see and did not control.

The country was not waiting to be discovered. It was being lived in. The miners who worked the creeks around Fortymile in 1895 had been there for years. The Tagish and Tlingit had been there for centuries. The HBC had been trading in the region for half a century. The Mounted Police had been present for two years. The question of who owned the ground, who had the right to work it, who could travel through it, and who would profit from it had already been asked and partially answered in a dozen small ways. The answers were incomplete, contested, and fragile. They were also the only answers that existed, and they were about to be overwhelmed by a force that no one in the country had the capacity to imagine.

In the winter of 1895-96, a man named George Carmack was living near the mouth of the Klondike River. He had come north in 1885 and had married a Tagish woman, Kate, the sister of Skookum Jim. In the summer of 1896 he would fish for salmon at the mouth of the Klondike, and, that not proving profitable, move up the river toward the creek that became Bonanza, which he began to explore for gold.

He was not yet there. He was fishing through the ice on the Yukon, or he was trading with the Hän, or he was sitting in a cabin at the river mouth, thinking about the coarse gold that had been found on the creeks to the west and wondering whether the streams that fed the Klondike might hold the same.

He was a man of no particular reputation, known to the few miners and traders in the area as a quiet, steady figure who had been in the country long enough to be trusted and not long enough to be respected. He had connections to the Tagish through his wife’s family, and he traveled with two Tagish men, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie, whose knowledge of the country and whose strength as packers and travelers made them useful companions on the creeks.

The police post at the mouth of the Klondike was a small operation. A constable or two, a log building, an occurrence book, and a claim register. The claims recorded there in the winter of 1895-96 numbered in the dozens, not the hundreds, and they covered creeks that had been worked for years by men who knew what they were doing and expected to keep doing it.

The register was a ledger of names and dates and creek locations, written in a careful hand, and it represented the sum of Canadian legal authority in the Klondike valley. The gold that would fill the next register, the one that would be opened in August 1896, was still in the ground. It lay in the gravel beds of Bonanza Creek and its tributaries—Eldorado, Hunker, Dominion, and Gold Run—where it had been deposited by geological processes over millions of years and where it sat, untouched, beneath the moss and the permafrost, unknown to the men who walked over it and unknown to the police who recorded the claims that did not yet cover it.

The established order of the Yukon in the winter of 1895-96 functions in ignorance of the discovery that would be made on Bonanza Creek the following August.