Gold Fever

Chapter 1: The Long Climb

The last man to die on the Chilkoot Pass that summer was a dentist from Portland, Oregon. Ambrose Creedy watched them carry the body down on a plank of spruce, wrapped in a horse blanket that had frozen stiff as sheet metal, and he thought: that could have been me yesterday, or the day before, or any of the thirty-seven days since I left Liverpool.

He was standing in a line of perhaps two hundred men and a handful of women, all bent under packs that would have shamed a mule, waiting their turn to ascend the final pitch—a near-vertical wall of ice and compacted snow known simply as the Golden Stairs. The name was a joke. There was nothing golden about it, and the stairs were hacked-out footholds that melted and refroze into treacherous lips of blue ice. A rope had been strung along one side, but it was frayed and slick, and the men ahead of Ambrose climbed mostly on their hands and knees.

He was thirty-one years old, lean from weeks of bad food and hard travel, with a weathered face that made him look forty. His hands were cracked and bleeding. His boots had been resoled twice since San Francisco and needed doing again. He carried sixty pounds on his back—flour, bacon, beans, a change of wool clothing, a compass, a hunting knife, and a leather satchel containing three letters from his brother George, the last of which had arrived in the village of Steeple Barton, Oxfordshire, fourteen months ago.

The letters were why he was here.

Georgie—he could never think of him as George, no matter that the boy was twenty-six now and presumably a man—had left England in the spring of 1896, swept up in the first reports of gold along the Klondike River. He had been working as a clerk in a shipping office in Bristol, bored and restless, and the news from the Yukon hit him like a match to dry tinder. He wrote home three times. The first letter was giddy, full of exclamation marks and grand plans. The second was more measured, describing the journey north and the staggering difficulty of the passes. The third, dated November 1896, was brief and oddly formal. He had reached Dawson City. He had filed a claim. He was hopeful.

Then silence.

Their mother, already frail, had taken to her bed in January and not risen. She died in March, calling Georgie's name in the last hours, and Ambrose had stood at her graveside in the Steeple Barton churchyard and made a promise he was not sure he could keep. He would find his brother. He would bring him home.

Now, standing in the line on the Chilkoot, watching the dead dentist slide past on his makeshift bier, Ambrose adjusted his pack and waited for the line to move.

The man ahead of him was a Swede named Lindmark, a former sailor with a blond beard that reached his chest. They had been traveling in loose company since Dyea, sharing fires at night but not much conversation, because Lindmark spoke only a dozen words of English and Ambrose spoke no Swedish at all. Still, they had developed a wordless understanding. When Ambrose stumbled, Lindmark steadied him. When Lindmark's pack split open on a rocky ledge, Ambrose helped him bind it with rope. Now Lindmark turned and pointed up the slope with one thick finger.

"Dawson," he said. It was one of his twelve words.

Ambrose nodded. "Dawson."

They climbed.

The Golden Stairs took four hours. Ambrose lost feeling in his fingers after the first hour and climbed by instinct, jamming his boots into the footholds, hauling on the rope, trying not to look down. Twice the man below him slipped and grabbed at his ankle, nearly pulling them both off the face. The wind came in gusts that seemed to carry ice crystals sharp enough to draw blood. Ambrose kept his head down and thought about Georgie—about the boy who used to follow him through the fields behind Steeple Barton, chattering about birds and clouds and the shapes of puddles, always running to keep up.

At the top, the world opened into a vast white plateau. Men sat on their packs, gasping. Some wept. A few laughed. Ambrose found a flat rock and sat down and ate a piece of hardtack so stale it might have been a roof tile. Lindmark sat beside him, and for a long time they said nothing, staring out at the immense and terrible landscape that stretched north toward the gold fields.

From the summit of the Chilkoot, Ambrose could see the chain of lakes that led to the headwaters of the Yukon River. The water was a deep, impossible blue, almost black, set in a frame of dark spruce forest and white peaks. It was beautiful in the way that a knife is beautiful—clean, precise, and dangerous.

They descended the north side of the pass and made camp at Lake Lindeman, where hundreds of men were building boats. The sound of hammering and sawing filled the air from dawn to dark. Trees were being felled so fast that the hillsides around the lake were already stripped bare, raw stumps sticking up like broken teeth. Ambrose had no skill with boats, but Lindmark, the former sailor, did. They spent a week building a flat-bottomed scow from green spruce planks, caulking the seams with spruce gum and strips of canvas. It leaked, but it floated.

They launched on a Tuesday morning in late July, joining a flotilla of boats, rafts, canoes, and contraptions that defied classification. The river carried them north through a series of lakes and rapids. At Miles Canyon, the water funneled between basalt walls into a chute of white water that had already killed a dozen men that summer. Ambrose gripped the sides of the scow and prayed—not to God, exactly, but to whatever force governed the physics of water and wood. The scow bucked and spun, took on a wave that soaked them both to the waist, and then shot through into calm water on the other side. Lindmark whooped. Ambrose vomited over the gunwale.

After the canyon, the river widened and slowed. The country changed—the mountains fell away, and the land became a rolling expanse of spruce and birch and muskeg, interrupted by creeks that fed into the main channel. The days were absurdly long. The sun barely set, skating along the horizon in a perpetual golden twilight that made it impossible to sleep. Ambrose lay in the bottom of the scow at night, staring up at a sky that refused to go dark, and thought about his brother.

Georgie had always been the dreamer of the family. Ambrose was the steady one—the one who stayed home, managed the small family farm after their father died, kept the books, mended the fences. Georgie was the one who read adventure novels by lamplight and talked about seeing the world. Their mother had indulged him. Their father, before he died, had called him soft. Ambrose had simply loved him, with the protective, slightly exasperated love of an older brother who knows that the world will not be as kind as the younger one expects.

And now the world had swallowed Georgie whole.

On the fifth day of river travel, they rounded a bend and saw Dawson City.

Ambrose had expected a town. What he found was a hallucination.

Dawson sat on a mudflat at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, hemmed in by hills on three sides and water on the fourth. It was not so much a city as a fever dream made of canvas and green lumber—thousands of tents, hundreds of hastily built cabins and storefronts, all crammed together on ground that was half mud and half permafrost. The streets, if they could be called streets, were rivers of muck. Dogs, horses, and men competed for space. The smell hit Ambrose before the sound did—a thick, complex stench of wood smoke, sewage, rotting food, and unwashed humanity. Then the sound arrived: hammering, shouting, the tinny jangle of a piano, dogs barking, and beneath it all a low, constant hum that was the collective noise of thirty thousand people living on top of one another in a place that had held perhaps three hundred souls two years before.

Lindmark guided the scow to a muddy bank downstream of the main waterfront. They tied up beside a dozen other boats and climbed ashore. Ambrose stood on the bank and stared at Dawson City, and Dawson City stared back with ten thousand eyes, all of them hungry.

"Dawson," said Lindmark, for the last time.

They shook hands on the riverbank. Lindmark was heading for the creeks—Bonanza, Eldorado, Hunker—where the gold was. Ambrose was heading into the town. They had traveled together for weeks, shared food and fire and fear, and now they parted with a handshake and a nod, because that was how things worked in the north. You met people, you traveled with them, and then they vanished into the vast indifference of the landscape.

Ambrose shouldered his pack and walked into Dawson.

The main street—Front Street, someone told him—ran parallel to the river. It was lined with saloons, outfitters, hotels, restaurants, and establishments whose purposes Ambrose could only guess at. Signs were nailed to every available surface: GOLD BOUGHT AND SOLD. CLAIMS RECORDED. DENTIST. LAWYER. BATHS 50 CENTS. LAUNDRY DONE. FRESH EGGS $1 EACH. The prices were staggering. A meal of beans and bread cost two dollars. A night in a hotel—a plank bed in a room shared with six strangers—cost five. Ambrose did the arithmetic in his head and felt his stomach tighten. His money would not last long.

He found a rooming house on Second Avenue, a two-story log building with a sign that read MRS. GUNDERSON'S LODGING—CLEAN BEDS, HONEST RATES. Mrs. Gunderson was a stout Norwegian woman with iron-gray hair and a face that suggested she had heard every lie the north could produce and was no longer impressed. She charged Ambrose three dollars a night, showed him to a narrow room with a cot, a washstand, and a window that looked out on the back of a butcher shop, and told him that breakfast was at six, no exceptions.

"I'm looking for someone," Ambrose said. "My brother. He came north last year."

Mrs. Gunderson looked at him with an expression that was not quite pity and not quite contempt. "Everyone here is looking for someone," she said. "Or running from someone. Sometimes both."

She left him alone in the room. Ambrose sat on the cot and took out the photograph.

It was a studio portrait, taken in Bristol before Georgie left. He was seated in a chair, wearing his best suit, his hair combed and parted. He looked young and earnest and slightly uncomfortable, the way people always looked in photographs. Ambrose studied the face—the narrow jaw, the wide-set eyes, the ears that stuck out just a fraction too far. Their mother's face, really. Ambrose had their father's heavier features.

"Where are you, Georgie?" he said aloud.

The room offered no answer. Outside, Dawson hammered and shouted and stank.

Ambrose washed his face, changed his shirt, and went out to begin his search.