Photo: Frances Backhouse

Beautiful British Columbia, Spring 1998

Sweat stinging my eyes and soaking my shirt, heart pounding, shoulders aching under the weight of my pack, I drag myself up one boulder to the next. No trail I have ever encountered matches this one for steepness and ruggedness. An ascent of 300 metres over less than two kilometres meant little to me when I read the numbers. Now every step, every breath brings the reality home. Yet no amount of exhaustion can curb my rising excitement as slowly, painfully, I approach the summit of the legendary Chilkoot Pass.

Ahead, Guri, a seasoned outdoor guide on holiday from Norway, confidently picks her way over the tumbled rocks. Behind me, my friend Suzanne keeps pace. We pause occasionally to catch our breath and gaze back at the green valley below us and the shimmering glaciers on nearby ridges. No one else is in sight.

How different from the scene one hundred years ago when the mass of humanity making its way over the Chilkoot Pass formed an unbroken line that snaked toward the summit every day from dawn to dusk. Driven by a lust for gold, these trekkers were on their way to the Klondike gold fields far to the north. Steamboats had brought them from Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, and San Francisco to the head of Alaska’s Lynn Canal. Hand-built rafts and scows carried them 880 kilometres down the Yukon River to Dawson City. They hauled themselves and a year’s supplies from the beaches of Dyea, over the Coast Mountains to the headwaters of the Yukon at Lake Bennett – a 53-kilometre endurance test for men and women alike.

The year 1898 was the height of the Klondike stampede, a romantic moment in history when some 30,000 people converged on a remote corner of the Yukon territory. Two years earlier, on August 16, 1896, rich deposits of ore had been discovered at Bonanza Creek. It took 11 months for news of this discovery to reach the outside world and another year for most fortune seekers to make their way north. By the turn of the century the throngs had either moved on to newly discovered gold fields in Alaska, or returned home in triumph or defeat.

During that short time the boomtown of Dawson rose at the confluence of the Yukon and Klondike rivers, a site previously used as a seasonal fishing camp by the Han natives. Thousands of claims were staked, mined, bought, and sold along the tributaries of the Klondike. A few lucky souls amassed great wealth. The rest broke even, at best, or lost every penny they’d invested in this mad adventure. Some paid for their folly with their lives.

For every 10 to 20 men who succumbed to Klondike fever, there was also one member of what Victorians called “the weaker sex.” These women struggled over the same trails, faced the same dangers and hardships, dreamed the same dreams. Many were spouses and sisters whose role was to provide all the comforts of home while their menfolk mined.

Others – spinsters, widows, and independent wives – went alone, armed with entrepreneurial visions. In Dawson and out on the creeks they found work cooking, housekeeping, washing laundry, sewing, and nursing, or, as one observer of the scene put it, “ministering to the wants of helpless masculinity.” In addition to the domestic workers and businesswomen, there were also female journalists, doctors, teachers, missionaries, stenographers, prospectors, and mining speculators. And like any gold rush, the Klondike also attracted an array of prostitutes and dance hall girls.

One woman who braved the Trail of ’98 was Martha Purdy, a young, well-to-do Chicago matron and mother of two. Martha and her husband, Will, started off for the Klondike together, along with her brother, George Munger, and several male friends. By the time they reached Seattle, Will was having second thoughts about venturing into the northern wilderness. He and his wife, he decided, should try their luck in the Sandwich Islands instead. Martha, intent on Klondike gold, refused to consider a change of plans. Unable to resolve their differences, they went their separate ways, never to meet again. When George heard about the Purdys’ break-up, his first inclination was to send his sister home to their parents, but eventually she convinced him to let her continue with him.

Martha crossed the Chilkoot Pass on a hot July afternoon clothed in a fashionable “outing costume” consisting of an ankle-length corduroy skirt lined with silk and interlined with buckram, silk bloomers, a blouse buttoned up tightly all the way to her chin, a pleated jacket, wool stockings, high leather boots, and a straw hat. Following in her footsteps nearly a century later – wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and sturdy hiking boots – I recall Martha’s description of her ascent:

As the day advanced the trail became steeper, the air warmer, and footholds without support impossible. I shed my sealskin jacket. I cursed my hot, high, buckram collar, my tightly boned corsets, my long corduroy skirt, my full bloomers which I had to hitch up at every step. Mush on.…Mush on.…Another breath! Another step….God give me strength. How far away that summit! Can I ever make it? Mush on….Mush on…or die!

Hindered by restrictive clothing and inappropriate footwear, Martha was also, unknowingly, two months pregnant. Not until she had reached the Klondike and the rivers had frozen, severing all contact with the outside world, did she realize her condition. Unlike many Klondike stories, Martha’s has a happy ending. She gave birth to a healthy baby boy that January and by spring had decided to make the Yukon her home. A few years later she married George Black, a prominent Dawson lawyer, and together they pursued a political life that culminated in Martha’s election as Member of Parliament for the Yukon at the age of 69.

Throughout my five-day trek I feel as if I am hiking with ghosts. When weariness threatens to overwhelm me, Martha appears like an apparition, urging me to “mush on.” In my imagination I share illicit sips from the flask of whiskey that Georgia White and her friend Minna fortified themselves with during the long climb. I fancy myself following the example of the high-spirited Edna Bush. Upon reaching the summit, this energetic young woman picked up a piece of board, tucked her skirts between her knees, and, with a loud whoop, went sailing down the snowy slope on the far side. At night, when I remove my boots and inspect my blisters, visions of 55-year-old Anna DeGraf hobbling over the Chilkoot Trail aided by a crutch, her sore feet wrapped in rags, are enough to banish all self-pity.

From the moment I hoisted my pack onto my back and started off along this trail, I have been remembering stories told by the women who went before me. Pausing to cool my feet in the glacier-fed Taiya River, I think of Mary Holmes, a correspondent for the San FranciscoExaminer who survived a brush with death on her very first day out from Dyea. Her dramatic retelling of her experience was published in the Examiner on August 29, 1897, under the title “A Woman’s Ride in Mad Waters.”

“This thing began,” she wrote, “by wading in gum boots over a mile, through icy water up to my waist, clinging to a rope lest I lose my footing in the swift stream.” When the river became too deep for wading, Mary and two men from her party climbed aboard their flat-bottomed scow. Their companions tried to ease the vessel across the river, but as it moved out into the current, the men holding the tow line lost their grip. Suddenly, Mary and her fellow passengers were speeding downstream towards a treacherous log jam that had already destroyed numerous boats and taken several lives:

I will not deny that I was frightened just a “wee bit.” Of course, I did not let my companions know my innermost feelings, because it was plainly to be seen that they, too, were anything but comfortable over the situation….We hit broadside on….Half over we went and then the rebound of the log sent us back again with such force that we shipped fully a barrel of water. Then the prow was carried under by the current, but almost at the same instant a huge wave struck the stern, wheeling us half way around and lodging us safely against the remnants of the old bridge. We were safe enough, but the sensations of the previous fifteen seconds had left us physical wrecks….The most embarrassing part of my adventure is that people will insist that I am a heroine, because I neither fainted nor cried out when apparently about to lose my life….All who pass my tent stop to get a look at ‘the brave, cool woman,’ as they call me.

Although the Chilkoot trail spared Lillian Oliver such death-defying moments, it nevertheless tested the limits of her courage and endurance. Travelling alone, except for a guide, Lillian joined the Klondike stampede in 1898 hoping to ferret out enough gold to relieve her ailing husband of the need to work. While on the trail she penned frequent letters to her “Dear Hub” back in Chicago. On June 11 she wrote from Canyon City, one of several bustling, makeshift settlements that had sprung up along the trail:

I am not gifted enough to tell you of the awful grandeur of my first day’s walk on the bed of the river, between Dyea and this place. The river crossed our path fourteen times. I crossed on a fallen tree once, waded four times, and was carried across nine times. We walked on and on, and did not see anything of the camp, so I had to call a halt. I had started with the determination of keeping my troubles to myself, but my feet were too blistered to go further. We had had a terrible walk four miles over sharp rocks, and I was in great pain every step I took. I wanted to lie down and rest, but was afraid of bears; for they had been seen on this part of the trail. At length, becoming too tired to resist, I lay down by the side of the trail....After a while tired nature got the better of me and I fell asleep. Don't know how long I had slept, when I was startled by a noise near by, and, hearing the guide jump up, concluded the bears had come. Without waiting to ascertain, I set up a yell that would have wakened the dead; and on jumping up was in time to see a horse shying and trying to throw its rider. No wonder; I had tied a large towel round my head to keep those dreadful mosquitoes from eating me up, and it was this white thing popping up out of the bush, accompanied by the scream, that had startled the poor horse.

Despite this inauspicious start, Lillian made it to Dawson by July 5, with no particular problems along the way other than discomfort and fear. Upon reaching the Klondike, however, she discovered her efforts had been in vain. Like many a gold seeker before and after her, Lillian learned that all the decent claims had long ago been staked and the cost of living in Dawson made it impossible to remain there without employment or a large bankroll.

To top things off, her guide, to whom she felt an enormous debt of gratitude for bringing her safely to her destination, fell desperately ill. With winter approaching, death seemed immanent unless he could be taken south. Lillian was the only person willing and able to accompany him. So, six weeks after reaching Dawson she turned around and left with him, without a single nugget of gold for her troubles.

If she had known she would fail in her quest, would Lillian have made her journey? Probably not, but I doubt she regretted going. For a Victorian housewife from Illinois this was the trip of a lifetime. Awed by the scenery at Sheep Camp, where she (and I) spent the night before tackling the “much-dreaded Pass,” she wrote: “Oh! who would live in civilization when they can surround themselves with such pictures? I step out and breathe this pure, fresh air, fill my lungs, and it makes me stronger, braver, to do and dare.” This, in the end, was the real gold for most stampeders – a sense of accomplishment, an unforgettable adventure, a life-changing experience.

That’s riches enough for me, I think, as I stand at last on the summit of the Chilkoot Trail. I raise my water bottle in a toast to Lillian Oliver, Martha Purdy, Mary Holmes, and all the other women who passed this spot a century ago. And then I carry on.