The Avalanche on the Summit

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. Sawdust lay in drifts along the beach where the sawmills had worked through the winter, and the lake, released from ice, was emptying itself of the fleet that had been its cargo since January. By the end of April 1898 the shore stood 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.

Thirty miles south, the mountain had not finished with the men who still climbed it.

The contrast was absolute. At Lake Bennett, the stampeders had built something. They had organized labor, elected camp councils, registered their vessels, and waited for the ice to release them. They had turned a frozen shore into a settlement with streets and names and a post office. On the Chilkoot, there was no settlement. There was a line. The line moved up the mountain and down the mountain and up again, a human chain of packers and relayers and men carrying fifty-pound loads on their backs across the same ground they had crossed a dozen times before. At Lake Bennett, the mountain had been mastered in wood and pitch and patience. On the Chilkoot, the mountain was still the mountain.

The spring of 1898 had come late to the coast. A storm system settled over the passes in the last days of March and held there, dumping snow across the Chilkoot and White Pass trails while the men below in Dyea and Skagway waited in their tents and hotels and saloons. The backlog grew by the day.

Steamers arrived at the tidewater ports from Seattle and San Francisco, discharging more men and more goods onto the mud flats and the docks, and the men looked up at the white mountains and saw the weather and went to find a bed or a tent or a drink while they waited. The line on the Chilkoot did not stop. It slowed, it thinned, but it did not stop, because the season was advancing and the ice on the lakes and rivers would not hold forever, and every man on the trail knew that the window between the breakup of the upper lakes and the freeze-up of the lower river was narrow and closing.

The North-West Mounted Police had been collecting customs duties at the summit of the Chilkoot since February 25, when troops had also arrived at Skagway to maintain order. A constable stood at the boundary line between Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, beside the tripod scale that weighed each man’s outfit, checking that the ton of goods was present and accounted for. The regulation had been designed to prevent starvation and to ensure that every man who entered the Yukon could sustain himself through a winter. Logistics, not danger, had produced the rule. The ton of goods was a guarantee against hunger. It was not a guarantee against the mountain.

On the second of April, a Saturday, the storm intensified along the coast. Snow fell across the Chilkoot trail from Dyea to the summit, driven by winds that came off the Lynn Canal and struck the mountainside with a force that bent tent poles flat.

At Sheep Camp, the last sheltered station before the final climb to the summit, the stampeders crowded into tents and cabins and waited. Some had been there for days, caching their loads along the trail above and below the camp, moving their ton of goods in relay, fifty pounds at a time, up the stone steps known as the Scales, across the summit, and down the far side to Crater Lake and beyond. The packers who charged cash to carry supplies up the trail, many of them Tlingit men who had been using the route for generations before any gold had been found, had been working through the winter. They charged according to the grade and the weather, and in the late-season storm the rates climbed with the snow.

The morning of April third was Palm Sunday. The storm had eased slightly overnight, though the snow on the upper reaches of the trail was deep and the wind at the summit was still strong. Men began to move early, packing their loads up from Sheep Camp toward the Scales, the steep section where the trail climbed a thousand feet over a distance of less than half a mile.

The Scales was the crux of the Chilkoot, the point where the trail steepened to a slope that in summer was described as a muddy jumble of boulders and short, steep ascents, and in winter became a staircase of snow and ice that men climbed in a line, each one placing his feet in the prints of the man ahead. Above the Scales, the trail rose toward the summit, a narrow passage between walls of rock and cornices of snow that hung from the ridgeline.

The line formed as it did every morning. Men with packs on their backs and ropes over their shoulders, pulling sleds loaded with flour and bacon and tools and tents, climbing in single file toward the customs post at the top. Some were carrying their own goods. Others had hired packers. The tramways that entrepreneurs had begun to build along the trail, using cables and engines to haul freight up the mountain, were operating in fits and starts, but most of the ton of goods still moved on human backs. The line was long. The snow was deep. The wind pushed against the climbers.

The avalanche came down from the east side of the summit, from a slope that rose above the trail near a point the stampeders called the Scales. The snow broke loose from a cornice that had been building through the week of storms, a heavy mass of wind-packed ice and powder that released without warning. It fell across the trail in a wall of snow and rock and ice that swept men off their feet and buried them where they stood.

The first men to react were the ones below the slide, the ones who had been climbing toward the Scales and had not yet reached it. They ran. Some dug. The snow was not powder but a dense, heavy mass that set like concrete after it stopped moving, and the men who had been caught in it were pinned in place, some upright, some on their sides, some buried entirely. The trail above the slide was cut off. The men who had already crossed the summit and were on the far side, descending toward Crater Lake and the lakes beyond, did not know what had happened behind them. The men at Sheep Camp below did not know how many had been on the trail.

Word reached Dyea within hours. A man came down the trail on foot, running where the grade allowed, and reached the telegraph office at the coast. The dispatch went out: avalanche on the Chilkoot, many dead, number unknown. It reached Skagway, and from Skagway it reached the wider world.

The North-West Mounted Police at the summit, who had been at their post at the customs line, sent men down to assist. The troops that had arrived at Skagway on February twenty-fifth to maintain order were mobilized and sent up the trail from Dyea.

The rescue was immediate and disorganized, because there was no authority on the trail with the power to command it.

The Mounted Police had jurisdiction on the Canadian side of the summit. The American troops had jurisdiction on the American side. The avalanche had fallen across the trail at a point where the line between the two countries was marked by a cairn of rocks and two posts, and the dead lay on both sides.

The digging went on through the day and into the night. Men worked with shovels and with their hands, breaking through the packed snow to reach the bodies beneath. Some were found standing, frozen in the posture they had been caught in, one hand raised as if to shield a face. Some were found with their packs still on their backs, the ton of goods that had been meant to sustain them now pinning them to the mountain. The count rose through the day. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. It did not stop at thirty.

The Mounted Police conducted an inquest. The procedure was formal, as all their procedures were formal, because the force operated on the principle that every death required a record and every record required a name. The constables took testimony from the survivors, from the men who had been on the trail and had seen the snow come down, from the packers who had been above and below the slide zone. The inquest report was filed with the names of the dead where they could be identified and with descriptions of the ones who could not. Some bodies were not found. Some had been carried over the edge of the trail by the force of the snow and had fallen into the gullies below, where the spring runoff would carry them down to the river valley when the thaw came.

The final count was more than sixty. The exact number was never settled, because the records contradicted each other. The Mounted Police inquest listed names that the survivors’ accounts did not confirm, and the survivors described men whose names no one had known. Some of the dead were women. Among the approximately fifteen hundred women who made the trek through the Chilkoot and White Pass trails, an unknown number had been on the upper trail that morning, carrying their own loads or traveling with husbands and brothers. The inquest recorded their names where it could.

The telegraph dispatches carried the news south. The story broke in the newspapers in Seattle and San Francisco and New York within days. The tone of the coverage was specific. Shock that the mountain had killed people was not the response. The mountains had been killing people all winter. Men had died on the White Pass trail, frozen on the trail or lost in snowstorms or fallen from the cliffs above the Skagway River. Men had died on the Chilkoot, of exposure, of exhaustion, of heart failure on the Scales. The newspapers had been reporting these deaths through the winter as individual events, brief items on the inside pages, the cost of the rush presented as the price of a bad choice or a weak heart.

The Palm Sunday avalanche was different. It was mass mortality. It killed more than sixty people in a single moment on a single slope, and the number was large enough to change the story from a series of accidents to a catastrophe.

The catastrophe exposed the structure of the trail. The Chilkoot was not a road. It was not even a path in the sense that a path implies maintenance and design.

It was a route, a line of least resistance across a mountain range that had been used for centuries by the Tlingit people who traded with the interior, and it followed the natural contours of the valley and the ridge because no one had built it. The stampeders who climbed it were not walking on a constructed surface. They were walking on snow that covered rock and ice and the accumulated debris of a thousand winters, and the snow was subject to forces that no regulation could control.

The ton of goods rule, the rule that Sam Steele had imposed and the constables at the summit enforced, was a measure of preparedness. It ensured that a man who entered the Yukon had enough food and tools and clothing to survive a year. It was a rational, bureaucratic response to the threat of starvation. It was also, in the face of the mountain, irrelevant. The flour and the bacon and the tent and the stove that a man carried on his back up the Scales did not protect him from the snow that fell from above. The rule that governed the trail could not govern the mountain.

The trail was closed for three days. The Mounted Police halted all traffic across the summit while the dead were recovered and the inquest was conducted. The line that had been climbing the mountain every morning stopped, and the men who had been waiting at Sheep Camp and at Dyea and on the tidewater flats waited longer. The closure was the first time since the previous autumn that the Chilkoot had been shut to traffic. The authorities on both sides of the border were conceding that the trail had become a killing ground and that the killing had exceeded the threshold the system could absorb as routine.

When the trail reopened, the line formed again. Men who had helped dig the dead from the snow picked up their packs and began to climb. The mountain had not changed. The cornices had been broken loose by the slide, and the slope where the snow had fallen was scoured to rock and ice, but the conditions above and below that point were the same as they had been before. The storm season was not over. The snow was still deep. The wind was still strong. The men climbed because the season was advancing and the ice on the lakes would break soon and the river would open and the window between the breakup and the next freeze-up was narrow and they had to reach Dawson City before it closed.

The reopening of the trail marked a shift. Before the avalanche, the stampeders on the Chilkoot had been a collection of individuals and small parties, each one making his own decisions about when to climb and what to carry and how fast to move. The Mounted Police at the summit weighed their goods and collected their customs duties, but they did not regulate the climb itself. There was no authority on the American side of the line that controlled the flow of men up the mountain, no system of permits or schedules or weather warnings. A man climbed when he chose to climb. He carried what he chose to carry. He took the risk that he chose to take.

After the avalanche, the trail began to change. The authorities on both sides of the border started to coordinate. The American troops at Dyea and the Mounted Police at the summit began to share information about conditions on the upper trail. The tramway operators adjusted their schedules to move freight when the weather permitted and to halt when it did not. The packers, many of them Tlingit, who had been carrying loads up the mountain all winter, began to work in larger groups, coordinating their movements to avoid the kind of concentration of men on a single slope that had made the Palm Sunday death toll so high.

The trail was not nationalized or militarized. It was not taken over by any government. But the practices on it shifted from individual decision-making toward collective coordination, from each man for himself toward a system where information moved up and down the line and the line moved together or not at all.

The shift was not altruistic. It was driven by the same force that had driven every other change in the stampede: the pressure of numbers. There were still thousands of men on the Chilkoot and White Pass trails in April 1898, and more arriving every day at the tidewater ports. The avalanche had killed more than sixty, but the line behind them was long enough that the deaths did not reduce the pressure on the trail by any measurable amount. The men who had died were replaced by the men who were still climbing. What changed was not the number of men on the trail but the way they understood the trail. The mountain had demonstrated that it could kill them all, and the demonstration was specific and recent and visible in the bodies that had been carried down to Dyea and laid out on the mud flats for identification.

The inquest report was filed. The names were recorded. The customs ledger at the summit continued to be filled in, entry by entry, as each man presented his ton of goods and paid his duty and crossed the line into Canada. The paper trail that the Mounted Police maintained, the system of records and registrations and permits that made the stampede legible to the institutions that governed it, absorbed the avalanche without breaking. The inquest was an entry in the record. The customs ledger was an entry in the record. The registration of boats at Lake Bennett was an entry in the record. The paper trail did not stop for the mountain.

The physical trail did. For three days, the line did not move, and the men who had been on it stood at the bottom and looked up at the slope where the snow had fallen and the bodies had been dug out, and they understood that the mountain was not a trail but a force, and that the force did not care about their ton of goods or their season or their claim on a creek in the Klondike. The claim they would stake, the legal fiction of ownership that would give them a piece of ground and a purpose and a place in the hierarchy of the gold fields, was meaningless on the slope above the Scales. The mountain owned that ground. The mountain had always owned it.

The trail was cleared. The bodies were buried or shipped south on the steamers that had brought the men north. The line formed again. The men climbed. The constable at the summit stood beside his tripod scale and weighed their goods and collected their duties and recorded their names. The wind came over the pass from the north, steady and dry, lifting loose snow into a haze that erased the horizon. The snow on the upper slope was deep. The cornices on the ridgeline were building again. Every man who climbed past the point where the avalanche had fallen could see the scoured rock and the scar in the snow where the slide had cut its path, and every man who climbed past it knew that the mountain could do it again.

The trail is cleared and the climb resumes, but every stampeder now moves under the shadow of the mountain’s demonstrated power. The line climbs past the scar in the snow, and the men who pass it do not stop. They have their ton of goods and their season and their claim waiting on a creek in the Klondike, and the mountain is above them, and the snow is building again on the ridgeline, and the constable at the summit records their names in the ledger as they cross the line. The ledger does not note which of them looked up.