The Breaking of the Ice

The constable at the summit recorded names in his ledger as men crossed the line. The ink froze on the nib. Down below, at the foot of the pass, the lake was still locked. But the ice had begun to shift. The collection of customs duties on the summit of Chilkoot Pass had begun on February 26, 1898, and the ledger was its instrument.

On the morning of April 25, 1898, a diarist at Lake Bennett wrote that the first long crack ran across the bay with a sound like a rifle shot, splitting the white surface from shore to shore. Men came running from their campsites, some still holding tools or tin cups, and stood at the edge of the ice and cheered. The sound meant release. After months of building boats on the frozen lake, sawing planks from the surrounding spruce and pine, caulking seams with pitch and oakum, waiting in camps that had become a raw, sprawling city of canvas and sawdust, the break had come. The water showed dark along the shore. The channel opened. The way north was clearing.

On the same day, a Mounted Police report logged at the Bennett detachment recorded the first boats registered for the downward voyage and noted the first wreckage sighted at the head of Miles Canyon. The number of boats on the lake exceeded seven thousand. The police had been counting since the previous autumn, tallying arrivals, weighing outfits, enforcing the regulation that each man carry a year’s supply of provisions. Now they counted again. The ton of goods that had been hauled over the pass, cached, repacked, and loaded into hulls built by men who had never before built boats was about to be launched onto a river that would test every plank and every seam. The official count of boats that would leave the lakes that spring was 7, 124.

The contrast was immediate. The diarist heard liberation. The police report heard the first sound of wreckage. Both were correct. The ice was breaking, and the armada was about to move, and the river was waiting.

The break came slowly and then all at once. Through the final days of April, the ice on Lake Bennett shifted in grinding, groaning masses that pressed against the shoreline and cracked under their own weight. Men stood on the beach and watched. Some tried to launch early, poling their boats through leads of open water that opened and closed with the wind. The water was barely above freezing. A man who fell in had minutes. The police at the Bennett detachment maintained their post on the beach, registering boats as they launched, inspecting hulls for seaworthiness, and recording the names of the men who stepped aboard. The ledger filled. The tonnage was weighed. The boats were numbered.

By the first week of May, the lake was clear enough to navigate, and the exodus began. Over seven thousand boats of varying size and quality—scows, skiffs, sweep scows, stern-wheelers built from green lumber, rafts lashed together from whatever timber remained—pushed off from the shore and into the channel. The forests around Bennett and Lindeman had been largely cut down for timber, and the shoreline was stripped. The boats represented the last wood for miles, and the men who had built them had no choice but to trust their own work. The final, mass launch of the armada that had been assembling since the ice began to break on April 25 was under way.

The fleet moved in a long, straggling line down the lake, some boats under sail, most under oar, all of them riding heavy with the weight of a year’s supplies. Flour, bacon, beans, rice, sugar, tea, salt, dried fruit, condensed milk, tools, stoves, canvas, blankets—the ton of goods that the Mounted Police had required at the summit now sat in the bilges of boats built by accountants and clerks and farmers and sailors and lumberjacks, men who had learned to saw a plank and drive a nail but who had never tested their work against moving water. The lake was calm. The channel narrowed. The first current caught the boats and they began to move faster, and the men at the oars felt the pull of the river for the first time.

Then the river narrowed further.

Above the settlement that would become Whitehorse, the Yukon River entered Miles Canyon. The walls of basalt rose sheer on both sides, and the river compressed into a channel less than a hundred feet wide in places, the water dropping through a series of ledges that turned the current into a boil of standing waves and rebounding spray. The canyon was half a mile long. Below it, the Whitehorse Rapids continued the drop, a quarter mile of broken water over a rocky bed that sent boats sideways and filled them full. The combined descent through the canyon and the rapids was the first real test of the fleet, and it came within the first day of the river voyage for most boats. Before the North-West Mounted Police established control, several hundred people had drowned or been wrecked here.

The Mounted Police had established a control point at the head of the canyon. A constable stood on the bank with a ledger. Every boat was stopped. Every hull was inspected. The constable looked for leaks, for planks that were loose or sprung. He checked the oars. He looked at how the boat sat in the water, whether the gunwale rode too low under the weight of cargo. He looked for a rope long enough to reach a swimmer. Men who passed the inspection were allowed to proceed.

Men who failed were turned back. Some were ordered to portage their cargo and their boats over a trail around the canyon and the rapids. Some were ordered to lighten their loads, to dump goods on the shore and come back for them, though everyone understood that goods dumped on the shore at Miles Canyon were goods that might never be reclaimed. The police held the authority. The constable’s word was final. There was no appeal.

The system was lifesaving and authoritarian in equal measure. Before the police established the control point, boats had entered the canyon without inspection, and the result had been catastrophic. Several hundred people had drowned or been wrecked in the canyon and the rapids before the police arrived. The exact number was uncertain. The police reports tallied the wrecks they saw and the bodies they recovered, but the river kept its own count, and the count was higher than any report could capture.

After the inspection point was established, the fatalities dropped. The constable turned back the unprepared, the reckless, the boats that were overloaded or badly built. The line of stampeders who had chafed under police authority at the summit of the Chilkoot now chafed again, standing in their boats on the shore of the river, waiting for a man in a red tunic to tell them whether they could proceed.

The wait could be long. On a day in early May, the line of boats backed up at the head of the canyon extended for a mile up the river. Men sat in their boats and waited. Some argued. Some pleaded. The constable inspected each boat in turn, and the process was slow because the process was thorough. A boat that passed the inspection entered the canyon with the current, and the men at the oars had to hold the boat straight in the boiling water, keeping the bow pointed downstream, fighting the rebounding waves that pushed the hull sideways toward the basalt walls. A boat that broached—that turned sideways in the current—was filled and swamped and wrecked against the rock. The men aboard had seconds to jump. The water was cold enough to stop a man’s heart before he could swim to shore.

The diaries of the passage capture the mixture of elation and terror that the river inspired. One stampeder wrote that the canyon was the most beautiful and terrible thing he had ever seen, the water green and clear and enormous, the walls rising like the walls of a cathedral, the current carrying the boat faster than any horse could run. Another wrote that he had never been so frightened in his life, that the boat shook and leaped and filled with spray, and that he was certain he would die before the rapids ended. Both were describing the same passage. Both were correct. The river was the impartial judge the Mounted Police could never be.

The police reports from the canyon are dry and factual. They list the boats inspected, the boats passed, the boats turned back, the boats wrecked, the bodies recovered, the cargo salvaged. The numbers accumulate. On a single day in mid-May, the report logged over two hundred boats inspected, a dozen turned back, several wrecked in the canyon despite passing inspection, and two men drowned. The next day’s report was similar. The day after that was similar again. The canyon was a filter. It removed the weakest boats and the least prepared crews from the fleet, and it did so with the mechanical indifference of moving water over rock.

Below the rapids, the river widened and slowed, and the fleet reassembled. Boats that had survived the canyon pulled into eddies along the shore, and their crews rested and bailed water and checked their cargo for damage. Some boats were missing. Some men were missing. The survivors did not always know who had gone under, because the fleet was large and the boats were many, and a man who drowned in the canyon might not be known to the men in the next boat, who were strangers to him and to each other. The community of builders at Lake Bennett, which had been a community of shared labor and shared purpose, was dissolving into a fleet of competitors, each boat for itself, each crew for itself, the river enforcing its own logic of survival.

The logic was Darwinian. The boats that were well built and lightly loaded and skillfully handled passed through the canyon and the rapids and continued down the river. The boats that were poorly built or overloaded or badly handled were wrecked, and their crews were lucky to escape with their lives. Their cargo—the ton of goods that had been hauled over the pass at such cost—was lost. The supplies that the Mounted Police had required as the condition of entry were now at the bottom of the river, and the men who had carried them were standing on the bank with nothing but the clothes they wore and the knowledge that the river had judged them and found them wanting.

The police at the canyon were not there to rescue the wrecks. They were there to prevent them, and when prevention failed, they tallied the results.

The reports moved up the chain of command, from the detachment at the canyon to the headquarters at Dawson, and from Dawson to the divisional headquarters at Regina, and from Regina to Ottawa. The numbers were read by men who had never seen the canyon and who understood the river as a line on a map with a figure attached to it. The figure was the cost of the passage. The cost was acceptable, in the sense that it was the cost that the system had been designed to bear. The Mounted Police had required the ton of goods to ensure that the stampeders could survive a year in the Klondike. The river now took its share of the tonnage, and the men who lost their goods were the men whose boats had not been equal to the task.

The system was working as intended, and that was the bitter fact of it.

Below the canyon, the river ran for five hundred miles to Dawson. The water was wide and slow in places, broken by rapids at Five Finger and Rink Rapids, and the fleet spread out over the length of the river in a long, thin line that stretched for miles. Boats moved day and night where the channel was clear, tying up to the bank at dusk where it was not. The shores were lined with campsites, some occupied by men who had wrecked and were waiting for rescue or transport, some by men who had stopped to rest or repair. The police maintained stations along the river, and at each station the boats were logged and the men were counted. The tonnage was checked. The system followed the stampeders down the river like a shadow.

The boats that survived the canyon were the ones that would reach Dawson. They carried their ton of goods and their crews and the hope that had sustained them since the previous summer, when the Portland had landed in Seattle and the stampede had begun. The hope was thinner now, worn down by the pass and the avalanche and the ice and the canyon, but it was still there, and the river was carrying them toward the goldfields, and the goldfields were waiting. The first boat with stampeders would reach Dawson on June 8, 1898.

The fleet was diminished. The river had taken its share. The boats that remained moved down the Yukon in a ragged line, spread across miles of water, each one carrying its cargo of flour and bacon and tools and blankets, each one carrying men who had built it and loaded it and launched it and survived the canyon and were now committed to the final five hundred miles of the voyage. They could not go back. The pass was behind them, and the ice was behind them, and the canyon was behind them. The river only ran one way.

The police reports from the river stations recorded the passage of the fleet in a steady, accumulating tally. Boats inspected. Men counted. Tonnage verified. Wrecks noted. The reports moved down the river as the boats moved down the river, and the two streams of paper and wood converged on Dawson, where the final accounting would be made. The Mounted Police had controlled the pass. They had controlled the lake. They had controlled the canyon. They would control the arrival.

The stampeders who had survived the canyon and the rapids were now on the open river, and the river was carrying them toward Dawson at a speed that they could not control and could not escape. The current was steady. The water was cold. The boats were heavy with the ton of goods that the police had required, and the ton of goods was the weight that kept the boats low in the water and the weight that would sustain them through the winter if they reached the goldfields, and the weight that had nearly sunk them in the canyon. The same weight. The same regulation. The same system.

The river was the final judge. The men who had built their boats well and loaded them carefully and handled them skillfully were the men who survived. The men who had not were the men who stood on the bank and watched their goods go down. The river did not care about hope or ambition or the price of passage or the labor of the trail. The river cared about the boat.

The fleet moved on. The boats spread out across the water. The river widened and the current slowed and the shores became low and wooded, and the water was dark with silt and cold with the melt of glaciers far upstream. The men at the oars rested. The boats drifted. The river carried them.

The police at the canyon finished their day’s inspections and filed their report, listing the boats and the men and the wrecks and the dead. The document would be filed and copied and sent up the chain. The river would keep its own record, which was longer and less precise and more final.

Below the canyon, the fleet was still moving. Boats that had passed the inspection and survived the rapids were now on the open river, bearing their exhausted crews and their ton of goods toward Dawson. The river was wide and the current was steady and the water was cold. The boats moved in a long, thin line that stretched for miles. Some boats were under sail. Most were under oar. All of them were riding heavy.

The exodus was a week-long event, not a single moment of liberation but a prolonged, grinding passage that tested every boat and every crew and every plank and every nail. The ice broke and the fleet launched and the river took its share and the survivors moved on. The canyon filtered and the river carried and the police counted and the reports moved up the chain and the fleet moved down the river toward Dawson. The ice had gone out on the Yukon River on May 29, and the flotilla had set out.

The diarist who had cheered the first crack in the ice was now on the river. His boat was moving. The canyon was behind him. The river was ahead. The goldfields were ahead. Dawson was ahead. The ton of goods in his bilge was the weight that had nearly sunk him in the canyon and the weight that would keep him alive through the winter if he reached the creek he had come to claim. The weight was the same. The regulation was the same. The system was the same.

The river carried him on.

The fleet was on the water, and the water was carrying it, and the water did not care about the men or the boats or the gold or the hope. The water ran downhill. The boats went with it. The police counted them as they passed, and the count was the record, and the record was the system, and the system was working.

The surviving, diminished fleet of boats was now on the river, bearing its exhausted cargo toward Dawson. The boats that had passed the canyon were the boats that would reach the goldfields, or some of them would, and the men aboard them were the men who would stake the claims or not, and the claims would pay or they would not, and the ton of goods would sustain them through the winter or it would not. The river had made its first cut. The canyon had made its second. The fleet was thinner now. The boats that remained moved on.

The river was wide and the current was steady and the water was cold, and the boats moved in a long, thin line that stretched for miles, and the line was moving toward Dawson, and Dawson was waiting.