Here Jack London and thousands of other would-be miners geared up for the trip to the Klondike gold fields, six hundred miles into the interior of the Yukon. He heard rowdy men shooting into the air just for the heck of it. Jack saw saloons where miners gambled and drank until they couldn’t walk. He passed jerrybuilt stores selling food and supplies at exorbitantly high prices. When he finished getting all his gear organized, Jack explored the makeshift settlement of fifteen hundred tents and crude wooden buildings crammed among the coastal scrub. (University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections UW14504) The Excelsior leaves San Francisco for the Klondike. Dogs snarled and fought among their masters’ legs. Jack heard loud curses against the sea wind. Everyone was in each other’s way, bumping and shoving and shouting. On the beach, wild- eyed men desperately grabbed their gear and began to sort through everything. In order to separate his and his partners’ thousands of pounds of gear from the supplies of all the other miners, Jack strained under the weight of axes, shovels, pans, cold weather clothes, stoves, and tents, along with one- hundred- pound sacks of rice, flour, sugar, bacon, and, of course, endless cans or crates of tinned beans.īeans, bacon, and bread- the three Bs- were the staples of the Stampeder, food that he and his partners would live on for a year while they hunted for gold in the Klondike. ![]() So the curly- haired, gray- eyed lad muscled his cargo out of the boat and then more than a mile down the flats to higher ground. He had to work fast because it was low tide, and soon the water would rise and sweep everything away. ![]() At five feet seven inches tall and weighing 160 pounds, Jack was fierce and muscular. With the seawater above his knees, Jack worked furiously. When the two canoes hit ground on August 7, 1897, Jack London and his partners, along with the Tlingit paddlers and their families, jumped into the icy water and pitched gear onto the flats. Horses, cattle, and dogs were sometimes pitched overboard to swim to shore, where masses of freight and baggage were dumped like garbage in chaotic heaps. Under the scowling gray sky, wide- beamed sailing dinghies and flat- bottomed craft ran men and cargo from steamers anchored a few miles offshore to the wide mudflats at Dyea. (Museum of History & Industry, Seattle, shs2365) Jack had traveled a long way- first by steamer from San Francisco, California, to Juneau, Alaska, and now by wooden canoe to the coastal village of Dyea (pronounced Die- EE), Alaska, one hundred miles north of Juneau.įormerly a small Tlingit settlement, Dyea had become a raucous boomtown of wooden and canvas shanties with tenderfoot miners trying to get organized for a trek over the Coast Mountains to look for gold. Clouds tumbled like ghosts over the craggy peaks above them. In a heavy drizzle, Jack London and his gold- mining partners sat in dugout canoes loaded with five tons of supplies as Sitka Tlingit paddlers drove their seventy- five- foot- long boats through heavy seas. ![]() By Peter Lourie illustrated by Wendell Minor
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