The Sawdust and the Nail

The men stood beside their boats and watched the ice break. It was April, and the cracks that had started near the shore, where the ice met the land, were now running out into the lake in long, jagged lines, and a crack opened near the eastern shore of Lake Bennett, running south with a sound like a rifle shot, then splitting into a fork that traveled toward the center of the lake where the ice was still white and solid. The water that welled up through the crack was black.

The men did not move. Their hands rested on the gunwales of boats they had built with their own hands through the winter, and the crack widened, and the water rose, and the waiting was over. The last boats had left Lake Bennett’s shore, and the men who built them were already on the water, steering their craft north toward the Yukon’s interior.

What stood behind them on the shore was something no one had seen before. Along the western bank of Lake Bennett, from the narrows at the south end to the mouth of the river at the north, the shoreline was lined with hulls. Thousands of them. Stern-wheelers and scows, flat-bottomed barges and staked boats, York boats and rowboats and rafts.

They sat on skids, on cradles of log, on beds of sawdust and brush, their prows pointing north toward the Yukon River and the five hundred miles of water that lay between the lake and Dawson City. Some were painted. Most were not. They were the color of fresh-cut spruce, pale and raw, and they smelled of pitch and resin and the sweat of the men who had built them. Three months of work stood on that beach, built by men who had never built a boat before and who would never build one again.

Several photographers worked the lake shore that spring, among them Eric A. Hegg, who had come north from Wisconsin and set up a studio in a tent at Bennett. His images of the lined-up hulls show row upon row of vessels stretching along the beach, their masts and steering sweeps rising against the white of the lake ice behind them. The photographs show the scale of the enterprise. They do not show the labor.

The labor had begun in January, when the first trees fell.

A man could hear the axes before he could see the cut. The sound carried across the frozen lake in the still air, a sharp, double-blow rhythm, the axe biting and then the chip falling. The trees were spruce and cottonwood, standing in the valley behind the lake and on the lower slopes of the hills to the west. They were felled by men who had been lawyers in San Francisco, clerks in Seattle, merchants in Portland, miners from the Cassiar, teamsters from Montana. They had come over the Chilkoot or the White Pass with their ton of goods on their backs, and they had set those goods down on the ice at Bennett, and now they needed a boat.

The North-West Mounted Police had made the boat a condition of entry. The regulation required each stampeder to carry a year’s supply of provisions, and the regulation assumed that those provisions would travel by water. No road led to Dawson. No trail ran along the Yukon River through the ice and the mountains. Only the river existed, and the river required a boat. The Mounties at Bennett, under the command of Superintendent Sam Steele, had enforced the provision requirement at the summit of the Chilkoot and at the top of the White Pass. The constables had weighed the goods, counted the sacks of flour and the sides of bacon, and turned back those who did not carry enough. And they had made it clear that the provisions would do no one any good if they could not be moved.

So the men built boats. The regulation demanded it. The ice would melt. The river would run. Dawson City lay five hundred miles to the north, and there was no other way to reach it.

The first tree felled for lumber on the shore of Lake Bennett was cut in the second week of January 1898. The ice was still solid. The temperature was thirty below zero. A former carpenter from Tacoma named Peterson felled it with a falling axe he had carried over the pass on his back. He bucked it with a crosscut saw, split the planks by hand using wedges and a sledge, and built a flat-bottomed scow on the ice beside his cache of goods. He finished it in eleven days. His was the first boat built at Bennett that winter, and by the time it was done, four more were under construction along the beach.

The number grew. By the end of January, thirty boats were under construction. By the middle of February, two hundred. By the first of March, the count exceeded seven hundred, and the shore of Lake Bennett had become a shipyard.

The customs records at Bennett, kept by the North-West Mounted Police and by the Canadian customs officer stationed at the post, document the flood of tools that arrived over the passes during January and February 1898. The manifests list crosscut saws, rip saws, hand saws, augers, brace-and-bits, caulking irons, mallets, chisels, planes, hammers, nails by the keg, pitch by the barrel, oakum by the bale, and bolts of canvas. The tools came from Seattle and Vancouver and Victoria, shipped north by steamer to Skagway and Dyea, packed over the passes on the backs of men and pack animals, and brought down to the lake. Each tool paid duty at the Canadian customs post. Each keg of nails was recorded. The paper trail of the stampede, which had begun with the provision requirement at the summit, now extended to every saw and every nail.

Three sawmills were operating at Bennett by the middle of February, their boilers fired with slab wood and their blades running day and night. The largest was built by John H. Brown, a former mill operator from Snohomish, Washington, who had brought his machinery over the White Pass on sleds. He charged ten dollars per thousand board feet for rough lumber. The price was high. The demand was higher. Men waited in line at the mill with their money in their hands, and the saw ran continuously, and the lumber came off the carriage green and wet and smelling of sap.

A second mill was built at the south end of the lake by a group of stampeders from Victoria who had pooled their capital. A third was erected near the narrows by a man named McDonald, who had been a shipbuilder in New Westminster before he came north. McDonald’s mill cut the longest planks, and his planks went into the largest boats. He charged twelve dollars per thousand, and he had more customers than he could serve.

The blacksmiths set up beside the mills. Their forges were made of rocks and clay, fired with charcoal, and their bellows were made of canvas and board. They sharpened saws, reset teeth, and forged bolts and drift pins and rudder irons. A dollar to sharpen a saw, two dollars to set it. The sparks from their forges rose into the dark air and fell on the snow.

The division of labor at Bennett was the most remarkable feature of the enterprise. Men who had been clerks became sawyers. Men who had been lawyers became caulkers. A physician from San Francisco built a stern-wheeler forty feet long, working from a set of plans he had copied from a book he found in another stamper’s cache. A former sea captain from Gloucester built a schooner-rigged scow and caulked its seams with oakum he had brought from home. A woman from Seattle, the wife of a stampeder who had died on the Chilkoot, built a flat-bottomed raft with the help of two men she hired at three dollars a day. She launched it in April and poled it down the lake and into the river, and she reached Dawson City in June.

The diaries of the stampeders record the techniques. A man named William B. Haskell, a former newspaperman from Ohio, kept a daily log at Bennett from January through April. His entries describe the process: the selection of trees, the felling, the bucking, the splitting, the shaping of planks with a drawknife, the fitting of ribs cut from natural crooks of cottonwood, the fastening with nails and bolts, the caulking with oakum and pitch. Haskell had never built a boat. He built one in nineteen days. He launched it on April 15.

Another diarist, a man named Tappen, a former merchant from St. Louis, described the scene on the beach in March. The whole shore was a shipyard. Seven hundred boats seemed to be under construction at once. The sound of the hammers was continuous from dawn to dark. The saws never stopped. Every man was a workman, and every man had a boat going up.

The sound carried across the ice and echoed off the hills. Hundreds of hammers striking hundreds of nails, the whine of crosscut saws biting into green spruce, the rasp of planes, the ring of augers boring through planks. It began at dawn, when the first men lit their fires and boiled their coffee and took up their tools, and it did not stop until dark, when the last nails were driven and the last planks were fitted.

The sound was the stampede turning. Men who had been waiting, who had been sitting in their tents and their cabins through the long dark of January and February, were now working. The stasis of the winter camp—the card games and the saloons and the false starts and the boredom and the despair—had broken. The ice had not broken yet, but the stasis had.

The men were building. They were turning the timber of the surrounding forest into the vessels that would carry them to the gold fields, and in doing so they were turning their individual hope into something collective. The boats on the shore were collective capital, the first tangible, productive output of the stampede, the first thing the stampeders had made that was not a trail or a cache or a camp. Vessels. Means of transport. The instruments of the next phase of the journey, built by the thousands.

The Mounted Police watched. Superintendent Steele had established his headquarters at Bennett in February, and his constables patrolled the beach and the mills and the camps. They did not direct the construction. They did not inspect the boats. They did not require plans or specifications. What they required was that each boat be registered, that each boat carry the provisions that had been weighed at the summit, and that each boat be seaworthy enough to survive the river. The constables recorded the registrations in their ledgers. They noted the name of the owner, the type of vessel, the length, the beam, and the number of persons it was intended to carry. The ledgers became the paper trail of the fleet.

Steele’s presence at Bennett was part of his larger command. He had been assigned to the Yukon district in February 1898, and he had moved his headquarters from the Chilkoot summit to the lake shore as the flow of stampeders shifted from the pass to the water. His orders were to maintain order, to enforce the customs regulations, and to ensure that no boat departed without its year’s supply of provisions. The regulation was the same regulation that had been enforced at the summit. The ton of goods was the ton of goods. The difference was that at the summit, the goods had been carried on men’s backs, and at the lake, the goods would be carried in boats.

The Mounties’ role at Bennett was less dramatic than their role at the summit. No weigh scales. No turn-backs. The constables did not stand at a boundary line and refuse entry. They stood on a beach and watched men build boats, recorded the registrations, and collected the customs duties on tools and lumber and nails. Their authority was administrative. It was also absolute. No boat left Bennett without a Mountie’s inspection. No boat departed without a certificate.

The economic micro-economy of the boat-building enterprise was substantial. The three sawmills at Bennett generated revenue that rivaled the revenue of the supply houses at Skagway and Dyea. The blacksmiths earned more per day than the miners who would eventually reach the gold fields. The lumberjacks, the men who felled the trees and bucked the logs, earned two dollars a day and their board. The caulkers earned three. The demand for labor was so great that men who had come north to mine found themselves working for wages at the shipyard, and some of them never left.

The merchants who had established stores at Bennett during the winter sold tools and lumber and hardware at prices that reflected the urgency of the demand. A keg of nails that cost three dollars in Seattle sold for twelve at Bennett. A crosscut saw that retailed for eight dollars brought twenty. A brace-and-bit brought five. The merchants did not apologize for the prices. The prices were the cost of distance, and the distance was real, and the men who paid the prices were men who had no choice.

The photographs taken by Hegg and others show the beach at Bennett in April, and what they show is a line of hulls that stretches along the shore for nearly a mile. The boats are of every size and type. Some are large, forty and fifty feet, with cabins and stoves and rudders. Some are small, twelve feet, barely enough to carry a man and his gear. Some are rafts, built of logs lashed together, with a platform of planks and a sweep-oar for steering. Some are elegant, with smooth hulls and clean lines, built by men who knew what they were doing. Some are crude, with rough planks and uneven nails, built by men who did not.

The boats were built from the forest that surrounded the lake. The spruce and cottonwood that grew in the valley and on the lower slopes of the hills provided the timber. The trees were felled and bucked and split and shaped by hand, or they were milled at the sawmills, or they were bought as lumber from the mills. The forest was stripped. The valley behind the lake was cleared of every standing tree within a mile of the shore. The stumps remained, and the slash, and the sawdust, and the smell of fresh-cut wood hung over the beach like a haze.

Sawdust was everywhere. It covered the ice. It covered the snow. It covered the floors of the tents and the cabins and the mills. It was in the hair and the clothes and the boots of every man on the beach. The by-product of the enterprise was also its medium. The boats were built on beds of sawdust. The planks were laid on sawdust. The nails were driven on sawdust. Sawdust was the surface of the work.

The nails were the fastening, the thing that held the planks to the ribs and the ribs to the keel. Without nails, the boats could not be built. The nails came from Seattle and Vancouver, in kegs of forty pounds, and each keg was recorded in the customs ledger, and each keg paid duty. The nails were the smallest and most essential unit of the enterprise, the unit of the stampede’s second subsystem, the one that followed the provision requirement and preceded the river run.

The deadline was the ice. The ice would break, and the river would run, and the boats would go. The deadline was not a date. It was a condition. The ice would break when it broke, and the men who were not ready when it broke would be left behind. The urgency was in the ice. The urgency was in the water that was beginning to show through the cracks in the third week of April. The urgency was in the sound of the ice shifting, a low, grinding moan that came from the center of the lake in the early morning, and that grew louder as the days passed.

The men worked faster. The hammers struck faster. The saws cut faster. The mills ran longer. The men who had been working ten hours a day worked fourteen. The men who had been working fourteen worked eighteen. The beach was lit at night by fires and lanterns, and the sound of the hammers did not stop, and the saws did not stop, and the men drove nails into planks in the dark, and the nails went in, and the boats took shape.

The boats built at Bennett were not ships. They were river craft, built for the Yukon River, which was wide and slow and shallow in places, and which ran through mountains and lakes and across a vast, flat plain to the mouth of the Klondike. The boats had to be sturdy enough to survive the river’s current and the lake’s chop. They had to be light enough to be portaged around the Whitehorse Rapids, which lay downstream from Bennett and which no boat could run. They had to be large enough to carry a year’s supply of provisions and the men who would eat them. They had to be small enough to be handled by two or three men who had never handled a boat on a river.

The designs were improvised. Some men used plans from books. Some men used plans from memory. Some men used no plans at all. The Mounties did not regulate the designs. They regulated the provisions. The boats were the stampeders’ own. The Mounties registered them and inspected them and certified them, but they did not design them. The designs were the product of the stampeders’ own judgment, and the stampeders’ judgment was, in many cases, poor. Boats sank. Boats leaked. Boats broke apart on the river. But the boats were built, and the boats were launched, and the boats went north.

The number of boats built at Bennett during the winter and spring of 1898 has been estimated at between three thousand and seven thousand. The Mounties’ registration records, which are incomplete, list over three thousand vessels. The photographs show hundreds of hulls on the beach. The diarists describe the shore as a forest of masts and prows. The number is uncertain because the records are incomplete and because some boats were built and launched without registration. But the number was in the thousands. The shore of Lake Bennett was the largest improvised shipyard in the history of the continent.

The provision requirement had created the demand for goods. The boat-building requirement created the demand for transport. The two requirements were linked. The Mounties had mandated the goods, and the Mounties had mandated the boats, and the two mandates together created a system that was self-reinforcing. The goods required boats. The boats required tools. The tools required import. The import required duty. The duty required records. The records required administration. The administration required police. The police required authority. The authority required the crown. The system ran from the crown to the nail, and the nail held the boat, and the boat carried the goods, and the goods fed the miner, and the miner dug the gold, and the gold paid for everything.

The stampede engine was this mechanism, which turned individual hope into collective capital, collective capital into administrative revenue, and administrative revenue into the infrastructure of a territory. The boats on the shore of Lake Bennett were the visible output of the engine. The sawdust was the by-product. The nails were the fastening. The paper trail was the record. The system was complete.

The men who built the boats did not think of the system. They thought of the river. They thought of the ice breaking and the water running and the five hundred miles to Dawson City. They thought of the gold. They thought of the claim they would stake and the creek they would work and the fortune they would make. They did not think of the customs ledger or the registration book or the duty on nails. But the customs ledger and the registration book and the duty on nails were there, and they were the framework within which the boats were built, and without them the boats would not have been built, because without the provision requirement there would have been no need for boats, and without the Mounties there would have been no provision requirement, and without the crown there would have been no Mounties.

Superintendent Steele saw it. The customs officer saw it. The constables who recorded the registrations and collected the duties saw it. They saw the stampede as a logistical operation, not as a gold rush. They saw the boats as transport, not as hope. They saw the nails as revenue, not as fastening. They saw the sawdust as waste, not as the medium of the work. They saw the paper trail as the record of a managed, state-imposed system, not as the chronicle of a wild and uncontrollable event.

The ice broke on the lake in the first week of May. The water rose. The boats floated. The men pushed them off the beach and into the water, and the current took them, and they went north, and the shore was empty.

Not entirely empty. The sawdust remained. The stumps remained. The slash remained. The mills remained, their blades silent, their boilers cold. The blacksmiths’ forges remained, the charcoal cold in the hearths. The tents and cabins remained, empty. The beach was a landscape of the aftermath of an industry that had lasted three months and produced thousands of vessels from the surrounding forest and employed thousands of men and generated thousands of dollars in revenue and been recorded in thousands of entries in the customs ledgers and the Mounties’ registration books. Sawdust lay in drifts along the beach where the boats had been built, stripped of its purpose, the industry of boat-building completed, the water carrying the stampeders toward Dawson City and the gold fields where their claims waited.

The boats were on the river now. The nails held. The planks held. The pitch sealed the seams. The water was cold and fast and the current pulled the boats north, and the men steered with sweeps and oars and the river carried them toward Dawson City and the gold fields and the claim they would stake and the creek they would work. The shore was quiet. The sawdust settled. The lake was still, and the fleet was gone.