The Long Wait on the Ice

The ice closed on Lake Bennett in the first week of November 1897, and it did not let go. A constable of the North-West Mounted Police, stationed at the north end of the lake to tally the stampeders and their goods, recorded the freeze in his patrol log with the brevity of a man writing in the cold. The water had gone hard overnight. By morning, the last boats that could still move were frozen where they sat. Those that had been hauled ashore stood upright in cradles of sawed logs, their hulls locked in a white field that stretched north toward the Yukon River and south toward the pass they had crossed to get here. The men who owned them stood beside their vessels and looked at the ice. There was nothing to do about it. The river would not open until May.

The camp did not disperse. It could not. Behind the stampeders lay the Chilkoot and the White Pass, the trails they had spent two months climbing, and beyond the passes lay Skagway and Dyea, where the last steamers of the season had already stopped running. Ahead lay five hundred miles of frozen river and lake, impassable until the thaw. The men were held in place by the same force that had frozen their boats. They settled where they stood.

Within two weeks, the beach at Lake Bennett held what one diarist called a city of canvas and log. The estimate was not extravagant. By December, the Mounties’ census counted between five and seven thousand people along the shores of Lakes Bennett and Lindeman, each one in possession of a year’s supply of food and equipment, because the law at the summit had required it. The ton of goods rule that had dictated the climb now dictated the camp. Every man had brought flour, bacon, beans, sugar, coffee, rice, dried fruit, and mining tools enough to sustain a claim through a season. The sheer volume of these supplies, stacked beside each tent and cabin, created something the trail had not possessed: a local economy of abundance and scarcity at the same time.

The stampeders had everything they needed to survive. They had almost nothing they wanted. A man who had packed four hundred pounds of flour and a hundred of bacon could trade the surplus for tobacco, or for liquor, or for a better axe. Lumber was scarce. The barter began within days of the freeze. By mid-December, the beach had organized itself into something resembling a street, with tents and rough cabins facing the frozen lake, and between them a traffic of men carrying sacks and crates, looking for someone who had what they lacked and wanted what they carried.

The Mounties watched. The constable and his fellow officers conducted patrols along the lake shore, recording the population, inspecting goods, settling disputes over firewood and tent sites. Their reports went north to Fort Herchmer at Dawson City and south to the division headquarters, and they carried in their dry phrasing the first signs that the camp was becoming something other than a temporary bivouac. The stampeders were building. Not just shelters. They were building a place.

The first cabins went up in late November, cut from the spruce and pine that stood on the hillsides above the lake. The trees fell to axes that had been packed for mine shafts and sluice boxes. Men who had been clerks in San Francisco and bank tellers in Seattle and farmers in Manitoba learned to square logs with a broadaxe, to notch corners, to chink the gaps with moss and mud. The cabins were small, eight by ten, twelve by fourteen, with dirt roofs and floors of packed snow covered in spruce boughs. They held a stove, a bench, a pile of provisions, and two or three men. They were built to last the winter. They did.

By January, the canvas tents that had lined the beach were giving way to a more permanent architecture. The stampeders laid out streets. The names were prosaic. Main Street ran along the waterfront. Side streets climbed the hillside. The layout was not planned by any authority. It emerged from the logic of the ground and the movement of feet, the way a path becomes a road becomes a street. The Mounties did not impose a grid. They recorded what the stampeders built and noted the addresses in their reports.

The cabins clustered. The clustering was social. Men from the same city, the same state, the same country, built near one another. There was a row of cabins occupied by men from Seattle, another by men from California, another by Swedes, another by Germans. The segregation was not enforced. It was the natural gravity of shared language and shared custom. The camp that had been a line of individuals on a trail became a collection of communities, each with its own cooking smells, its own songs, its own arguments.

The merchants came first. They had been on the trail before the freeze, hauling goods north by sled, and they set up as soon as the population stabilized. A man named Lindeberg opened a store on the beach, selling provisions and hardware at prices that would have been impossible in any town with a railhead. Flour that cost four dollars a hundredweight in Seattle sold for twelve at Lake Bennett. Bacon brought double its Skagway price. An axe that wholesaled for a dollar and a half retailed for six. The merchants did not gouge, exactly. They charged what the traffic would bear, and the traffic bore a great deal, because every man in the camp had a year’s supply of goods and the need to supplement what he had not thought to bring.

The saloon-keepers came next. They operated out of tents at first, then out of cabins, and they served whatever they could distill or ferment or import. The liquor was rough. One diarist described it as tasting of turpentine and regret. But the stampeders drank it, and they played cards, and they bet on everything. The gambling was constant. A man with a surplus of beans and a shortage of coffee could find a game in which the stakes were provisions, and he could win or lose a winter’s worth of food in an evening. The Mounties did not prohibit gambling. They watched it. The constable’s report for January noted that several establishments were operating games of chance and that no disturbance had resulted. The tone was observational. The police were not there to reform. They were there to prevent violence and to count.

The ton of goods rule had made each man a capitalist of sorts. He carried his capital on his back and in his cache, and the frozen lake became a marketplace where the currency was bacon and the exchange rate was set by hunger and boredom. The Stampede Engine, which had driven the migration north, now idled on the ice. It did not stop. The engine ran on the requirement that every man carry a year’s supplies, and the supplies themselves became the medium of trade, the basis of credit, the collateral for debt. The merchants who sold to the stampeders at Lake Bennett were selling to men who could pay in kind, in goods that had been mandated by the Canadian government, hauled over a pass, and stacked on a frozen beach. The rule that had been designed to prevent starvation had created a market.

The camp organized itself further. By February, the stampeders had established a court. It was not a court of law in the formal sense. It was a miners’ meeting, an institution borrowed from the gold fields of California and Montana, where a gathering of men could hear a dispute, render a verdict, and impose a penalty. The Mounties tolerated it, and in some cases deferred to it, because they were few and the camp was large and the disputes were minor. A man accused another of stealing firewood. A man claimed a cabin site that another had already occupied. A man’s dog killed another man’s dog. The miners’ meeting heard the case, argued it, and decided. The decisions were recorded in a ledger kept by a man appointed as secretary, and the ledger was brought to the Mounties for their file.

The authority of the miners’ meeting was customary, not statutory. It rested on the consent of the men who attended it. The Mounties’ authority was statutory. It rested on the law of Canada and the regulations of the North-West Mounted Police. The two systems existed side by side on the frozen lake, and they did not collide, because the disputes were small and the men who judged them were the same men who would be judged. But the coexistence was provisional. The camp was in Canada. The law was Canadian. The stampeders were mostly American, and they accepted the Mounties’ presence because the Mounties did not interfere with what they considered their own business. The tolerance would last as long as the business stayed small.

A newspaper appeared. It was called the Bennett Sun, and it was printed on a press that had been hauled over the Chilkoot Pass in pieces and assembled in a cabin on the beach. The first issue, dated February 1898, contained local news, prices of provisions, a list of boats under construction, and a column of advice from a man who signed himself Old Timer. The press run was small, perhaps a hundred copies, and the paper was passed from hand to hand until it fell apart. But it existed. A camp that prints a newspaper has decided to stay.

The photographs tell the story the reports cannot. Eric A. Hegg, a photographer from Wisconsin who had come north with the stampede, set up a studio in a tent at Lake Bennett and documented the camp with a large-format camera. His images show a settlement that looks less like a temporary camp than like a frontier town in the process of becoming permanent. The streets are laid out. The cabins are chinked and roofed. The stores have signs. The men stand in front of their buildings with the posture of owners, not transients. The boats on the ice are not abandoned. They are parked. They wait, as their owners wait, for the water to open.

The wait was not easy. The cold was extreme. The temperature at Lake Bennett dropped to forty below zero in January and stayed there for weeks. The lake ice cracked and groaned as it contracted, and the sound carried across the camp like artillery fire. Men froze their feet and their hands and their faces. The Mounties recorded the cases of frostbite in their reports, noting the severity and the treatment, which was usually warming and, in the worst cases, amputation. A man who went outside without adequate covering could lose a foot in an hour. The cold was not an inconvenience. It was a lethal force, and it enforced a discipline that the Mounties did not need to impose.

The boredom was worse than the cold. A man could build a cabin, cut firewood, cook his meals, and maintain his equipment in four or five hours a day. The rest was empty. The stampeders filled it with whatever they could. They gambled. They drank. They argued. They organized debates and singing competitions and sled races on the ice. They read whatever printed matter they could find, which was not much. They wrote letters, and the letters could not be sent, because the mail went out with the last steamer in October and would not come again until the river opened. The letters were written and sealed and stacked in cabins, waiting for a mail run that was months away. The men wrote to people who could not read what they wrote, and they wrote about a place the people they addressed could not imagine.

The enforced idleness produced a stratification that the trail had not allowed. On the trail, every man had been equal in his exertion. He carried his pack, he climbed the pass, he hauled his sled, and his worth was measured by his strength and his endurance. On the ice, the measure changed. A man with a surplus of goods could trade, could hire labor, could finance a boat, could invest in another man’s claim. A man with a shortage of goods could work for wages, could sell his labor, could become an employee. The distinction between owner and worker, between capitalist and proletarian, emerged on the frozen lake as clearly as it would emerge in any industrial town. The ton of goods rule had been intended as a survival measure. It had become a class marker.

The workers were there. They were the men who had arrived at the lake without a full year’s supply, or who had consumed what they brought, or who had traded it away at a loss. The North-West Mounted Police turned back those who arrived at the summit without the required ton, but some men slipped through, and others had arrived before the regulation was enforced. These men needed to eat. They found work with the merchants, with the boat-builders, with the cabin-builders, with any man who had goods and needed labor. The wage was paid in food, in clothing, in a share of a boat, in a stake in a claim. The labor market at Lake Bennett was not large, but it was real, and it was the first labor market most of these men had ever participated in that was denominated in bacon and flour.

Women were present too. Not many, but enough to be noted in the reports and the diaries. Some were wives of stampeders, sharing the cabin and the cache. Others ran their own operations. Cooking skill brought a price that would have shamed a San Francisco restaurant. Needlework on canvas and clothing fetched whatever the market allowed. A woman who could sing or play an instrument drew audiences that were desperate for distraction. The Mounties noted the presence of women in the camp and recorded the occupations. The notation was neutral. The police did not regulate the economy of the camp. They regulated the peace.

The peace held. The reports from Lake Bennett through the winter of 1897-98 recorded no homicides, no riots, no major disturbances. There were thefts, assaults, and disputes, but they were handled by the Mounties or by the miners’ meeting, and they did not escalate. The calm was partly the cold. A man who started a fight at forty below risked more than a beating. He risked exposure. The calm was partly the Mounties. Their presence was small but visible, and their authority was accepted because it was exercised with restraint. The calm was partly the nature of the population. These men had invested everything they had to reach this lake. They were not going to risk it in a brawl.

The investment was the point. Every man on the ice had spent months of labor and hundreds of dollars to get there. The pass was behind him. The ton was hauled. The cabin was built. The investment was not just financial. It was psychological. A man who has spent six months and a thousand dollars to reach a frozen lake is a man who has committed himself to the next step, and the next step was the river, and the river led to Dawson, and Dawson led to the creeks where the gold was. The claim was the end-point that justified the cost. Every man on the ice believed he would reach it. The belief was what kept the camp orderly. Disorder would have meant failure, and failure was not something these men could afford.

The boat-building was the one activity that consumed the camp’s energy with a purpose. Every man who intended to go down the river needed a boat, and the boat had to be built on the lake, because there were no boats for sale and no boats to be had. The spruce on the hillsides provided the lumber. The tools were what the men had carried or could buy from the merchants. The designs were improvised. Some men built flat-bottomed scows. Others built sternwheelers. Others built boats that were neither one thing nor the other, hybrids of sail and sweep and steam, assembled from planks that did not quite fit, caulked with whatever would hold, and launched with a prayer.

The boats accumulated on the ice. By March, the count exceeded three thousand vessels on Lakes Bennett and Lindeman, and more were going up every day. The Mounties tallied them. The merchants sold lumber and nails and pitch. The boat-builders who had skill hired themselves out to those who had none, and the wage was a share of the vessel or a stake in the journey. The frozen lake became a shipyard, and the shipyard was an industry, and the industry was the first organized productive activity the stampeders had undertaken since they left home.

The industry produced something beyond boats. It produced a community of purpose. The men who built boats beside one another, who borrowed tools and traded lumber and consulted on designs, were forming the bonds that would carry them down the river. The partnerships made on the ice would become the partnerships of the creeks. The debts incurred in lumber and labor would be paid in gold dust or in the labor of working a claim. The social structure of the camp, the merchants and the workers, the gamblers and the builders, the men with surplus and the men with shortage, was a rehearsal for the social structure of Dawson. The lake was a draft. The city on the Klondike would be the final copy.

The winter of 1897-98 at Lake Bennett was not an interlude. It was a formation. The enforced pause, the freeze that held the boats and the men in place for five months, was the period in which the stampede ceased to be a movement and became a society. The ton of goods rule had created the conditions. The North-West Mounted Police had provided the framework. The cold had enforced the discipline. The rest was human nature, which is to say, the tendency of people in proximity to organize themselves into markets, hierarchies, laws, and customs, regardless of where they are.

Of the estimated thirty thousand to forty thousand people who reached Dawson City during the gold rush, only around fifteen thousand to twenty thousand finally became prospectors. Of these, no more than four thousand struck gold, and only a few hundred became rich.

The men on the ice did not know these numbers. They could not know them, because the numbers did not yet exist. But the numbers were already in motion.

The men who built boats on Lake Bennett were building the population that would fill Dawson, and the proportion of that population that would find gold was already fixed by the geology of the creeks and the economics of the supply chain. The claim that each man carried in his head, the claim that justified the ton and the pass and the frozen lake, was a claim that would be available to fewer than half of them, and would pay off for fewer than that.

The daylight returned in February. The change was gradual at first, a few minutes a day, then an hour, then two. The sun cleared the ridge to the south and struck the lake ice, and the ice did not melt, but it began to glow. The temperature rose from forty below to twenty below, then to ten below, then to zero. The men noticed. They had been measuring the winter by the cold, and the cold was receding. The boats on the ice caught the light. The caulking dried. The planks swelled. The vessels that had been frozen in place since November began to look like vessels, like things that could float.

The cracks came in April. They started near the shore, where the ice met the land, and they ran out into the lake in long, jagged lines. The ice groaned. The sound was different from the winter cracking, which had been sharp and violent, the sound of contraction. This was slower. This was the sound of expansion, of ice letting go of what it held. The men stood on the shore and watched. The boats stood on the ice beside them. The provisions were stacked in the cabins. The Mounties walked the beach and noted the change. The river was still frozen. The lake was still frozen. But the freeze was no longer absolute. There was movement in the ice, and the movement meant that the wait was ending.

The stampeders began to load their boats. They carried sacks of flour and sides of bacon and boxes of beans and coils of rope and picks and shovels and pans and stoves and tents and blankets from the cabins to the vessels on the ice. They packed the boats where they sat, because the ice was still solid enough to hold, and because they wanted to be ready. The loading was a kind of countdown. Each boat that was packed was a boat that was waiting, and the number of packed boats grew through April, and the number grew faster as the light lengthened, and by the third week of April the beach was a line of loaded vessels pointing north, and the ice beneath them was cracking, and the water was showing through the cracks, and the men stood beside their boats and watched the ice break.