Stampede by Brian Castner

Author:Brian Castner [Castner, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

On May Day, Dawson City had been on the edge of starvation.

A fortnight later, the markets were as stocked as a Parisian emporium. “Everything is for sale here,” Adney saw, “fresh grapes to opera glasses, safety-pins to ice-cream freezers.” A bag of flour, when one was for sale at all, had been worth $150. Now it went for $3, less than cost, because the disgusted newcomers just wanted to liquidate their outfits and go home. When the local newspaper suggested opening a sausage factory and supplying it with packs of stray dogs, it was not for lack of food but merely to clear the streets clogged with canines.

For still the mob kept coming. “This crowd, it is a vast herd,” thought Adney. “It is at once curious, listless, and dazed, dragging its way with slow lagging steps. Can this be the rush that newspapers describe?”

Many looked disappointed. “This is not as big as Skagway,” said one newcomer to Adney. He was wrong. In a few short weeks Dawson would be many times larger.

That summer, Adney met Robert Henderson, the gaunt man who lost out to George Carmack on the Klondike discovery. Henderson looked ill, stringy as the gristle off a two-bit steak. He had spent the winter in his sickbed and the limp in his leg was pronounced. Henderson told Adney his whole story, about being the first to find gold in the Klondike valley and then losing his chance to stake on Bonanza or Eldorado because Carmack broke the miners’ code and never told him about his discovery. And how he had even lost his claim on Gold Bottom Creek, which was now named for Hunker.

Adney asked Henderson if all that made him discouraged.

“No,” said Henderson. “There are as rich mines yet to be discovered as any that have been found.”

But the man’s face told a different tale.

Adney realized he had found his lead for his Harper’s Weekly story. Adney wrote the tale of Henderson’s woe and sent out a manuscript and hand sketches to Harper’s, three pounds of paper in total. In time, after Adney left Dawson City, the two men would begin a correspondence, and later Henderson would give Adney a small golden pin, the insignia for the Yukon Order of Pioneers, the badge that certified Henderson’s status as a pre–gold rush sourdough. “That is all I have got after two and half years prospecting, living on meat straight,” Henderson said. It was a prized possession for any man, which is why he handed it over.

“You keep this,” he said to Adney. “I will lose it too.”

Few worked so hard for so little, but in truth most prospectors in the Yukon left disappointed. Not Jack London. He was happy to escape. When he arrived in Dawson in May, he went immediately to St. Mary’s hospital, to get treatment from Father Judge’s nurses. London’s right leg had retracted against his body. “Now almost entirely crippled,” he thought. At the hospital they gave London potatoes to eat and told him to leave Dawson to save himself.

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