The Kingdom of the Pack Train

The horse went down in the mud of the White Pass trail on a stretch of slope no wider than two feet across, its legs folding under a pack loaded without regard for the animal’s condition. Sacks of flour split open against the rocks. A crate of bacon broke apart and spilled into the bog. The man who had paid for the horse stood on the narrow track above the animal and watched. He had purchased it in Skagway two days before, at a price that would have bought a sound horse in Seattle. The animal had been coughing when he bought it. The seller had assured him the cough would clear on the trail. This was the third horse to collapse on this section of the path in the hour before noon, and the track was already becoming difficult to distinguish from the surrounding ground because of the bodies.

October 1897, the White Pass. The trail began gently enough, rising from the mudflat at Skagway through a corridor of spruce and cottonwood that gave no warning of what lay above. Then it climbed. The path narrowed to a track cut along the faces of mountains, in places no more than two feet wide, bordered by drops of hundreds of feet onto rocks below. In the wider sections, the ground was covered with boulders and sharp stones that cut at the horses’ legs and hooves with every step. The animals that survived the narrow sections foundered on the boulders. The ones that survived the boulders were driven until they dropped from exhaustion, or from disease, or from the simple fact that they had been overloaded by men who had no experience with pack animals and no intention of learning.

By the end of 1897, thirty-two hundred horses lay dead on the White Pass trail. Most had died within a two-mile stretch of slope. Their bodies were left where they fell, sometimes used as stepping-stones by men who had to walk over them to continue up the path. The smell of decomposition hung in the cold air along that section of the trail like a fog that would not lift. The stampeders who passed through gave the route a name. They called it the Dead Horse Trail.

The name was accurate. It was also incomplete. The horses were the visible cost of a commercial system that had taken hold of both passes within weeks of the first arrivals from the south. The system operated in the open, on the mudflats at Skagway and Dyea, at the trailheads and the roadhouses that had sprung up along the routes, at the summit where the North-West Mounted Police maintained their post and their scales.

The stampeders needed to move a year’s supply of goods—roughly two thousand pounds per man—across the coastal mountains to the headwaters of the Yukon River, where they could build boats and run the lakes and rivers down to Dawson City. The Mounties had made the requirement absolute: no man would be permitted to enter Canada without his ton of goods. The regulation was designed to prevent starvation in the interior. By its very precision, it also created the most reliable market that the merchants and packers of the Pacific coast had ever encountered.

That market worked on the stampeders’ immobility. Men arrived at Skagway and Dyea with their goods piled on the beach, and they discovered that the trail ahead was not a path but a corridor of controlled access, where every stage of progress carried a price.

The price began at the trailhead. Horses were sold at Skagway for prices that ranged from fifty dollars to several hundred, depending on the animal and the seller and the desperation of the buyer.

Many of the animals sold were diseased. Glanders, a bacterial infection of the respiratory system, swept through the horse herds at Skagway and Dyea that autumn. The sellers knew. The buyers did not.

A man who had spent his savings on a horse that died on the first day of the trail was forced either to buy another at another inflated price or to carry his goods on his own back, fifty pounds at a time, making repeated trips up the pass and caching each load before returning for the next.

The round trips could take a full day each. A man with a ton of goods faced weeks of this labor.

The alternative was to hire a packer. Packers charged by the pound. Rates on the White Pass and the Chilkoot varied with the weather and the congestion on the trail, rising as the line of men lengthened and the snow deepened.

In the early weeks of the stampede, packing rates from Skagway to the summit ran between five and seven cents per pound. By October, as the weather turned and the trail deteriorated, rates climbed. Some packers charged twelve cents per pound for the run from Skagway to Lake Bennett.

A man with a ton of goods at twelve cents per pound paid two hundred and forty dollars for the passage, roughly four months’ wages for a skilled laborer in San Francisco. The distance was approximately forty miles. The packers did not guarantee delivery. They did not carry insurance. They operated on the simple principle that the stampeders had no alternative.

The roadhouse operators occupied the next tier of the system. Along both trails, at intervals that corresponded roughly to a day’s travel, tents and cabins had been erected where stampeders could sleep, eat, and cache goods. The roadhouses charged for each service separately. A meal cost between one and three dollars. A bed for the night cost another dollar or two. Storage for cached goods cost still more. A man making repeated trips up the pass, caching loads at intervals, might pay for storage at three or four roadhouses over the course of several weeks. The charges accumulated. Diaries and letters home recorded them alongside the costs of horses, of packing, of supplies purchased at inflated prices in Skagway and Dyea.

The receipts formed a paper trail that ran parallel to the physical trail, and the figures on those receipts told a story that the stampeders themselves could not always read: that the wealth of the Klondike was being extracted before any of them reached the gold fields.

The merchants at the trailheads understood the economics with a clarity that the stampeders, focused on the creeks and the gold they expected to find there, generally lacked. A man who sold a horse for a hundred and fifty dollars that he had purchased in Seattle for thirty dollars made a profit that was certain, immediate, and not subject to the risks of mining. A packer who charged ten cents per pound for a run to Lake Bennett made his money whether the stampeders found gold or not. A roadhouse operator who charged two dollars for a meal of beans and bread made his money every day, from every man on the trail, without regard for the outcome of any man’s journey. The merchants and packers were not gambling. They were operating a toll road, and the toll was extracted from the stampeders’ hope.

The White Pass trail, running from Skagway over the coastal mountains to the interior, had been improved by entrepreneurs who charged tolls for the privilege of walking on ground that had been cleared of the worst obstructions. Tolls were collected at points along the trail, and the stampeders paid them because the alternative was to take a longer route or break a path through unbroken ground. The entrepreneurs who had built the toll sections had not built them to the standard that the traffic demanded. The trail was boggy where it should have been drained. It was narrow where it should have been widened. It was steep where switchbacks could have eased the grade. The improvements were sufficient to justify the toll and insufficient to make the passage safe. The horses died on the improved sections as readily as on the unimproved ground.

The photographic record of the White Pass trail during the autumn of 1897 is among the most damning documents of the stampede. Photographers working the trail—among them Eric A. Hegg, whose images of the Klondike rush would become the standard visual record—captured the scenes that the diaries and the receipts could only describe.

Horses stand in mud up to their knees, their ribs visible through their hides. Packs abandoned on the trail, their contents scattered, appear in frame after frame. The bodies of horses on the narrow sections of the path lie where they fell, sometimes three or four in a single image. The line of men and animals stretches up the mountain, a column of traffic that moved at the pace of the slowest animal and stopped entirely when one went down and blocked the track. The photographs were taken in daylight, by men who stood on the trail and pointed their cameras at what was in front of them. There was no need for artistry. The facts were sufficient.

The facts were these. The White Pass trail was approximately forty miles long, running from Skagway to Lake Bennett, where the stampeders would build or buy boats and rafts for the run down the Yukon River system to Dawson City. The trail climbed from sea level to the summit of the White Pass, at an elevation of over three thousand feet, and then descended through a series of valleys and small lakes to the headwaters of the Yukon. The trail had been a trading route used by the Chilkat people for generations before the stampeders arrived. It had been adequate for the volume of traffic that the trade required. It was not adequate for the volume that the stampede produced.

The congestion at the worst sections was sufficient to bring all forward movement to a halt for hours at a time. The horses that stood in the congestion, loaded and unable to move, died where they stood.

The Chilkoot trail, running from Dyea to Lake Bennett by a different route, was shorter but steeper, climbing to an elevation of over thirty-five hundred feet at the summit. The Chilkoot could not be used by horses in its upper sections. The final pitch to the summit, known as the Scales, was a slope of approximately fifteen hundred feet that men climbed on foot, carrying their goods on their backs or pulling sleds by rope. The Chilkoot was the route for men who had no horses. The White Pass was the route for men who did. The choice of route determined the kind of ordeal that the stampeders would face, but it did not determine the cost. Both routes were controlled, at every stage, by the commercial ecosystem that had grown up to extract value from the passage.

That ecosystem was not chaotic. It was organized. The packing companies that operated on the trails maintained ledgers, charged published rates, and competed with each other for business in ways that kept prices high enough to be profitable but not so high as to drive stampeders to the alternative of self-packing. The competition was limited by the physical constraints of the trails. There were only so many horses. There was only so much room on the track. The packers who held the best sections of the trail, or the fastest routes, could charge what the market would bear, and the market would bear a great deal, because the stampeders had no choice but to move their goods or abandon them.

The ton rule, which the Mounties enforced at the summit, guaranteed that the stampeders would not abandon their goods. They would carry them, or they would pay someone to carry them. The regulation created the market. The market filled the trail.

The records of the packing companies, where they survive, show the profitability of the operation.

A packer with a string of horses working the White Pass trail could move several tons of goods per day, at rates that generated revenue sufficient to cover the cost of the horses—many of which died and were replaced—and to produce a margin that would have been considered excellent in any line of business. The horses were a consumable input, like fuel. A horse that cost fifty dollars and carried goods worth twenty dollars per trip, making four trips before it died, produced eighty dollars in revenue against a fifty-dollar cost. The arithmetic was simple. It was also, in a sense that the stampeders understood but the packers did not acknowledge, monstrous.

The horses were being worked to death for the profit of men who had no stake in the gold that the stampeders sought. The packers were not mining. They were mining the miners.

The distinction was lost on no one. Diaries filled with bitterness as resources diminished. Prices of horses, of meals, of packing rates, of storage fees—each was entered alongside the names of the merchants and packers who had charged it. The condition of the horses sold, the number of dead animals passed on the trail—these, too, went into the record. The diaries were evidence. They documented the transfer of wealth from the stampeders to the commercial operators, a transfer that was taking place before any gold had been mined, before any creek had been staked, before any man had reached Dawson City. The transfer was the first settled economic consequence of the stampede. The gold would come later, for some. The extraction was happening now, for all.

The roadhouses along the trail were the most visible expression of the commercial ecosystem, because they were the points where the stampeders stopped and where the charges accumulated.

A roadhouse at Canyon City, on the White Pass trail, might charge a man a dollar for a bed, two dollars for a meal, and fifty cents per day for storage of cached goods. A man making repeated trips up the pass might spend a week or more at a single roadhouse over the course of his passage. The charges at a single roadhouse could exceed twenty dollars. A man who cached goods at three roadhouses could spend sixty dollars or more on storage alone, before the costs of meals and lodging.

The roadhouse operators did not set their prices by the cost of the goods they provided. A meal of beans and bread cost cents to produce. Prices were set by the stampeders’ lack of alternatives. There was no other place to eat. There was no other place to sleep. The roadhouse operators held a local monopoly, and they priced accordingly.

The monopolies were geographic. Each roadhouse occupied a position on the trail that corresponded to a day’s travel, and the stampeders who reached a roadhouse at the end of a day’s travel were not inclined to continue to the next one in the dark. The roadhouses were spaced at intervals that maximized their captive market. The operators who had chosen the best sites—those at the points where the trail narrowed, or where the grade steepened, or where the horses most commonly gave out—charged the highest prices. The operators who had chosen less favorable sites charged less. The market, in this sense, was competitive. But the competition was between monopolists, each of whom held a local advantage that the geography of the trail had conferred. The stampeders moved from one monopoly to the next, paying at each stop.

The system extended to the supply of goods themselves. At Skagway and Dyea, the price of provisions bore no relation to the cost of the goods themselves but rather to the cost of transporting them to the trailhead and the absence of competition from any other source. A sack of flour that cost four dollars in Seattle sold for eight or ten dollars in Skagway. A side of bacon that cost twelve dollars in San Francisco sold for twenty or more. The stampeders who had arrived without sufficient supplies, or whose supplies had been damaged in transit from the south, were forced to buy at the trailhead prices.

The merchants who sold at these prices were not speculators. They were the same merchants who had supplied the mining camps of the Yukon for years, and who understood the economics of supply in a region where transportation was the dominant cost. The difference was one of scale. The stampede had multiplied the demand, and the merchants had multiplied their margins accordingly.

The horse trade was the most egregious expression of the system, and the one that produced the most visible evidence.

The sellers who brought horses north from Seattle and other Pacific coast cities knew that the animals would be sold at a premium, and they knew that the premium would be higher if the supply were constrained. The supply was constrained by the capacity of the steamers that carried horses north, and by the fact that many of the animals that arrived were already in poor condition after the sea voyage. The sellers who purchased horses in Seattle for thirty or forty dollars and sold them in Skagway for a hundred and fifty or two hundred dollars were operating within the margins that the market allowed. The margins were sufficient to absorb the cost of the horses that died in transit or on the trail. The sellers did not guarantee the health of the animals because the stampeders had no recourse.

A man who had bought a diseased horse and watched it die on the trail could not return it. He could not sue. He could not complain to the authorities, because the authorities—the North-West Mounted Police—were at the summit, not at the trailhead. The police had no jurisdiction over the sale of horses in Skagway, which was in American territory. The horse trade operated in a jurisdictional void that the sellers exploited fully.

The void was not accidental. It was a product of the geography of the border and the placement of the customs posts. The North-West Mounted Police enforced the ton rule at the summit of the passes, on the Canadian side of the border. The merchants and packers operated on the American side, at Skagway and Dyea, where the police had no authority. The stampeders were subject to two jurisdictions: the American, which did not regulate the commercial operations on the trails, and the Canadian, which regulated the movement of goods and people across the border but not the commercial practices that determined how those goods and people arrived at the border. The gap between the two jurisdictions was the space in which the commercial ecosystem flourished. The merchants and packers operated in the gap. The stampeders fell into it.

The gap was the source of the profits. The merchants who sold horses and provisions at inflated prices, the packers who charged exorbitant rates for the passage, and the roadhouse operators who charged monopoly prices for meals and lodging were all operating in the jurisdictional space between the American trailhead and the Canadian customs post. Their profits were extracted from the stampeders’ passage through that space. The extraction was systematic. A commercial ecosystem had organized itself to capture value from the movement of goods and people through a constrained corridor. The ecosystem had its own logic. The stampeders had to move. They could not move without supplies. The supplies could not be moved without paying the toll. The toll was the profit. The profit was certain.

The certainty was the point. The merchants and packers who operated on the trails were not taking the risks that the stampeders were taking. They were not risking their lives on the trail, or their capital on mining claims that might or might not produce gold. They were risking their capital on the certainty that the stampeders would continue to arrive, that the Mounties would continue to enforce the ton rule, and that the trail would remain the only viable route to the interior.

The first two conditions were guaranteed by the stampede itself, which showed no sign of abating as the autumn progressed. The third was guaranteed by the geography of the coast mountains, which offered no alternative route that was not longer, harder, and more expensive than the passes. The merchants and packers were operating in a market that was, for the duration of the stampede, a license to print money. The license was not issued by any government. It was issued by the geography and the regulation.

The regulation that the Mounties enforced at the summit—the requirement that every stamper carry a year’s supply of goods—was the foundation of the commercial system. Without it, the stampeders would have traveled light, carrying only what they needed for the passage, and the market for packing and supply would have been smaller. With it, the stampeders were required to move a ton of goods each through the corridor, and the market for packing and supply was multiplied by the weight of the requirement.

The regulation was designed to prevent starvation in the interior. It also, by its effect, created the economic machine that was extracting wealth from the stampeders before they reached the interior. The Mounties at the summit did not intend this. The merchants at the trailhead did not plan it. The system emerged from the interaction of the regulation and the geography, and it operated with an efficiency that neither the regulators nor the merchants had designed.

The stampeders who passed through the system understood what was happening to them, but their understanding came after the fact, recorded in diaries and letters that documented the charges they had paid and the animals they had lost. The reckoning showed that the cost of the passage, for a man with a ton of goods, could exceed three hundred dollars in packing fees alone, plus the cost of horses that died, plus the cost of provisions purchased at trailhead prices, plus the cost of meals and lodging at the roadhouses. The total could exceed five hundred dollars.

That sum represented months or years of wages for a working man, and it was extracted before the stamper had reached the lakes, before he had built his boat, before he had run the Yukon River to Dawson City, before he had staked a claim or swung a pick. The extraction was the first mining operation of the Klondike rush. It was the most reliable.

The parasitic economy of the trail had a finite life. It would last as long as the stampeders continued to arrive and the passes remained the only viable route. The stampeders continued to arrive through October and into November, in numbers that the trail could not absorb. The weather turned. The mud on the lower sections of the White Pass froze, making the footing treacherous for horses and men alike. The snow came, first in flurries and then in accumulations that narrowed the trail and buried the worst of the obstacles. The horses continued to die. The packers continued to charge. The roadhouses continued to collect. The system ground on, extracting its toll from every man who passed, until the stampeders who had begun the passage in September and October began to arrive, financially drained and physically exhausted, at the lakes at the head of the Yukon River system.

Lake Bennett was where the trails ended and the water began. The lake, a long narrow body of water at the head of the Yukon River system, was the point where the stampeders assembled after crossing the passes. They arrived with what remained of their goods—what the trail had not taken from them in fees and losses—and they began to build boats. The boatyards at Lake Bennett and the neighboring lakes grew through the autumn and into the winter, as the stampeders who had survived the passage gathered at the water’s edge and prepared for the next stage of the journey.

Money had been taken by the merchants and packers of the trail. Horses had been taken by the Dead Horse Trail. Time had been taken by the weeks of passage and the delays at the roadhouses and the congestion on the track. What remained was the goods—the ton that the Mounties required—and the determination to reach the gold fields. The goods were the residue of the system’s extraction. The determination was the only asset that the system could not charge them for.

The sound of hammers and saws carried across the frozen shore. The boats took shape, rough-hulled and flat-bottomed, built for the river run that would begin when the ice broke in the spring. The men who built them had been processed by the trail. Its toll had been paid. Its horses had been buried. Its charges had been entered in diaries and letters. Now they stood at the water’s edge, looking south at the mountains they had crossed and north at the river they would run, and they understood that the trail behind them had been the first mining operation of the Klondike rush, and that they had been the ore.